UNITED STATES
Chronicle of Social Change
by Colleen Friend November 15, 2015
“Spotlight,” an independent film based on a column of the same name in The Boston Globe, is about the cover-up of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. The film gets a lot right, from the ensemble cast to the embedded messages about secrets, insiders/outsiders and child sexual abuse (CSA). It is clearly an Oscar contender.
On the evening of November 2nd at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, Calif., director and co-writer Tom McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer explained their two-and-a-half-year crafting process that explored The Boston Globe’s reporting for the column. The Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work demonstrated, in the parlance of the writers, that it took a village to cover up clergy sexual abuse.
Confidential settlements, parish transfers, priests on sick leave or awaiting assignment, and assurances of limited liability all collide here to pique the curiosity of the newly appointed Jewish editor from Miami, Marty Baron, portrayed by Liev Schreiber, who wonders aloud why The Globe had not really pursued this before.
The answer is not a mystery to the insiders at the paper, who worry about suing Cardinal Law, upsetting their own family members’ and readership’s traditions and being leaned on to look the other way. The writers pointed out that they wanted to show that it really took an outsider to see the importance of this story for the Boston community.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.