Ex-Boston Globe Editor Marty Baron Hails ‘Spotlight’: Filmmakers ‘Nailed’ Story

UNITED STATES
Hollywood Reporter

by Scott Feinberg

The man who oversaw the landmark sex abuse investigation — which you can read here — says he has no complaints about the resulting film, which moved him to tears and which he hopes will provoke renewed interest in investigative journalism.

“There’s something oddly incongruous about all of the events and the red carpet interviews that surround a movie when you’re dealing with a subject that’s as serious as this one,” says Marty Baron, the former editor of The Boston Globe, in reference to Spotlight, the acclaimed new film — in which he’s played by Ray Donovan’s Liev Schreiber — about the Globe’s 2002 investigation that exposed a massive sex abuse scandal in the city’s Catholic Church, for which the paper was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2003. “But,” he acknowledges with a laugh, “it’s been fun.”

Three years ago today, Baron, 61, left the Globe to become the editor of The Washington Post — another publication famous for its investigative reporting — and, in so doing, thought he was closing a chapter of his life that had been unlike any other. He’d covered important stories for decades, but the Catholic Church investigation “was the most meaningful work that I’ve been involved in,” he says, “because it had such a direct impact on people’s lives — not politicians, but ordinary people. It had such a profound impact on the Catholic Church then, and even today I think its impact endures. Its impact went way beyond the Church and went into how other major institutions deal with accusations of sexual assault.”

Eight years ago, long before he left the Globe, Baron was approached by producers Nicole Rocklin and Blye Faust, who said they were working on putting together a film about the paper’s coverage of the scandal. He was forewarned, however, that it might not come to fruition — “It’s a difficult subject, and not everybody loves journalists,” he notes. A few years later, the producers lined up Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy to pen a script, and Baron says, “When Josh and Tom really started doing their research, I had a sense that this really might be real — but I knew that they had to obtain financing, as well, and that that would be a huge challenge.”

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