UNITED STATES
Variety
Sacha Pfeiffer
@SachaPfeiffer
No good can come from getting involved with Hollywood.
That was my firm conviction when a pair of producers approached me and my Boston Globe Spotlight team colleagues seven years ago with what seemed a fanciful proposal: that one of our past projects, on the Catholic Church’s cover-up of clergy sex abuse, could become an intriguing film.
I was highly wary. Never mind that the grim topic would likely have little appeal to mainstream audiences. Never mind that our jobs are hardly cinematic — we make phone calls, review documents, collect data — and were unlikely to be compelling on screen.
Beyond that, I feared for our personal lives, the loss of privacy, the inevitable sensationalism as reality morphed into screenplay. I envisioned fictionalized interoffice affairs — the Hollywoodization of our lives.
But my colleagues had fewer reservations, and were persuaded by Blye Faust and Nicole Rocklin’s pitch: They told us they wanted to make a movie that would celebrate journalism at a time when the newspaper industry is in great financial peril.
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.