UNITED STATES
Deadline
By Mike Fleming Jr
December 9, 2015
Spotlight has been in the Oscar hunt since Toronto Film Festival audiences gave it a long, thunderous standing ovation. At the heart of the film is a team of dogged journalists whose exposé of the shameful Boston Archdiocese cover-up of pedophile priests led to the forced resignation of the all-powerful Cardinal Bernard Law. The film subsequently has been as well-reviewed as any this fall, even getting a thumbs up from the Boston Archdiocese, which acknowledged the role the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Spotlight team played in forcing the church to confront a malignancy and renew its vow to stop predatory priests, who previously were moved to other parishes, leaving shattered lives and hush-money payouts in their wakes. Despite its incendiary subject matter, Spotlight so far hasn’t had to bear the brunt of accuracy attacks that hobbled so many fact-based Best Picture aspirants in recent years.
Spotlight director Tom McCarthyDirector Tom McCarthy and his co-writer Josh Singer took a page from The Globe’s investigative Spotlight team playbook: They stuck to the facts. For The Globe, that mandate grew out of a series of 1992 stories the paper wrote about predator priest James Porter, which caused Cardinal Law to threaten to bring down the wrath of God to ostracize the newspaper in the Catholic community comprising the majority of its readership.
The topic of predatory Catholic priests was just as polarizing for Hollywood, a factor in DreamWorks dropping the picture before Open Road signed on. Other inherent risks in the film were structural: no traditional lead, and, as Spotlight reporter Mike Rezendes says, “no Hollywood clichés, no car chases, no sex scenes and no guns. Just a true story.”
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