UNITED STATES
Los Angeles Daily News
By Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News
POSTED: 11/04/15
A story about a great job of journalism has been turned into a movie that may be the most journalistically scrupulous ever made.
“Spotlight” recounts the Boston Globe’s eponymous investigative reporting team’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the local Catholic Archdiocese’s cover-up of what turned out to be a systemic pedophile priest scandal. The resulting 2002 series of some 600 articles revealed that more than 70 priests had been protected by the church, and triggered revelations of similar abuse by priests in 105 American cities and 102 dioceses throughout the world.
Director Tom McCarthy (“The Station Agent,” “The Visitor”) and his co-writer Josh Singer (“The Fifth Estate,” TV’s “The West Wing”) spent months in Boston doing detailed research to create a screenplay and subsequent movie that feels infused with authentic detail about the investigation.
The movie’s Spotlight team is played by Michael Keaton as editor Walter Robinson, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo as reporters Sacha Pfeiffer and Michael Rezendes, and Brian d’Arcy James as researcher Matt Carroll. Liev Schreiber is the Globe’s new executive editor Marty Baron, who came from the Miami Herald and on his first day in the newsroom requested Spotlight dig into the story of a single Boston priest, which grew into the much bigger effort.
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