‘Spotlight’ Journalists Grapple With Big-Screen Portrayals, by Mike Mcphate, New York Times (February 24, 2016)

“Journalistic objectivity be damned. I’m hoping it wins the entire lot.”

That’s Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post and former editor of The Boston Globe.

It has been a disorienting time for the journalists like Mr. Baron depicted in “Spotlight,” the film about The Globe’s investigation in 2002 of sexual abuse of children by members of the Roman Catholic clergy.

Mr. Baron, portrayed in the movie by Liev Schreiber, said the embrace from Hollywood had melted away any pretense of impartiality about the outcome of the Oscars race. The movie is up for six Academy Awards, including best picture.

With the ceremony approaching, Mr. Baron weighed in Wednesday with an essay for The Post.Mr. Baron said he was overcome during the film’s showing at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. After the credits rolled, the actors were called on to the stage, then the journalists, for a sustained standing ovation.“It was an emotional moment,” he wrote. “I thought about the long-ago work that led to the movie, and how its impact would now be magnified. I thought about how the public might now see why journalism is necessary. And I thought about the oddity of this whole scene in which I had a part: how the saddening subject of sexual abuse had arrived at this bizarre intersection with celebrity, paparazzi and red-carpet interviews.”Mr. Baron said the idea for a movie had bounced around for years before suddenly taking off in 2014. Only when he met with his acting counterpart, Mr. Schreiber, did Mr. Baron begin to appreciate what he’d gotten himself into. “We met for less than two hours, and as we talked it occurred to me that this was not quite an interview,” he wrote. “This was an observation session, much like a psychiatrist’s. Only these observations would not remain confidential. They would be revealed to millions.”On the film set, Mr. Schreiber would eventually portray him as “a stoic, humorless, somewhat dour character that many professional colleagues instantly recognize,” Mr. Baron wrote.

Mr. Baron was just the latest of several journalists from The Globe to weigh in on the experience. In an essay in The Globe in late 2014, Walter Robinson, the investigative team leader portrayed by Michael Keaton, said he was a fan of Mr. Keaton’s work in “The Paper,” the 1994 journalism drama, but this was different.

“He’s playing me, not a fictional metro editor.” Mr. Robinson wrote. “It’s like watching yourself in a mirror, yet having no control of the mirror image.”

Also writing in The Globe, Michael Rezendes, the reporter portrayed by Mark Ruffalo, a best supporting actor nominee, described a different type of discomfort.

“It wasn’t always pleasant to be rocketed back in time,” he wrote. “Each of us spent weeks interviewing victims, and I had heard more than a few stories I had tried to forget. And yet there was Mark, bringing it all back home.”

In an interview with her hometown newspaper, The Columbus Dispatch, Sacha Pfeiffer, the reporter played by Rachel McAdams, a nominee for best supporting actress, said the project made her uneasy.

“I said to my husband, ‘I think Rachel might have played me too intense and serious.’ And he burst out laughing,” Ms. Pfeiffer told The Dispatch. “He said, ‘Yes, you are that intense and serious.’ ” In her essay in The Globe, Ms. Pfeiffer noted the frumpy look Ms. McAdams adopted for the film was also a reality check.

Ben Bradlee Jr., an assistant managing editor at The Globe portrayed by John Slattery, had a unique reason to be wary. In an interview with The Fresno Bee, Mr. Bradlee said his father, who was immortalized by Jason Robards in the journalism classic “All the President’s Men,” once told him that he would forever be associated with Mr. Robards.

Now, the son has his own Hollywood avatar in Mr. Slattery. But he has lost any reservations.

“People might see the film who would have never read the story originally,” Mr. Bradlee said. “We are hopeful, as a result of the film, more survivors will come forward, and it will give journalism, especially print journalism, which is in a bad way in this country right now, a shot in the arm.”

One reporter, Matt Carroll, the so-called data geek on the team played by Brian d’Arcy James, has avoided the limelight. “I just wanted someone who was better looking than me, which frankly is not all that difficult,” Mr. Carroll said in an interview with The Globe. “He looks great. I keep telling people he does me better than I do me.”