HOLLYWOOD (CA)
We Got This Covered
June 15, 2013
Lauren Humphries-Brooks
Matt Damon likes bringing major social issues to the big screen. He did it most recently with hydrofracking in Promised Land, he tried to do it in Green Zone, and now he’s interested in handling the Catholic Church sex scandal in Tom McCarthy’s new film.
Damon is reportedly the frontrunner to star in McCarthy’s film about the Boston Globe reporters who hunted up and broke the story that Cardinal Bernard Law was moving priests accused of sexual assault into other parishes, effectively covering up the sex scandal. Law was America’s Senior Catholic Prelate, the Archbishop of Boston, and the first high-level official to be accused of covering up child molestation charge within the Church. He resigned as Archbishop in 2002, but not before sixty-five parishes in the Archdiocese had to be closed down.
The scandal that was broken by the Boston Globe had far-reaching consequences for the Catholic Church, and seems like perfect fodder for a social reform film. McCarthy’s film wants to be a sort of All The President’s Men-style drama, which means that it would trace the journalists covering the story, and presumably the attempts at cover-up. McCarthy has been working on the script with Josh Singer (The West Wing) for awhile now. With Matt Damon interested and potentially involved, and DreamWorks already on board, it sounds like the film is moving closer to actual production.
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