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START
THE
PRESSES
“Spotlight” isn’t
the first film about
newspapers to earn
awards buzz.
All the
President’s Men
(1976)
$70.6m
JOURNALISM CHIC Rachel McAdams,
Tom McCarthy, Michael Keaton and Mark
Ruffalo work amid a re-creation of the
Boston Globe newsroom in “Spotlight.”
Robert Redford and
Dustin Hoffman
play Bob Woodward
and Carl Bernstein
in this story of the
reporting behind
the Watergate scandal.
Nominated for
eight Oscars, it won
four, including supporting
actor (Jason
Robards) and adapted
screenplay (William
Goldman).
ABSENCE OF MALICE: SNAP STILLS/REX SHUTTERSTOCK
lion domestic take, which 1981’s “Broadcast
News” ($51 million) and 1994’s
“The Paper” ($39 million) couldn’t
come close to matching. Despite critical
acclaim, “The Insider” limped to $29 million
in the U.S. on a production budget of
$90 million.
“Spotlight’s” subject matter could
have been off-putting. But the journalist-sleuths
create an avenue for audiences
to understand an unsettling subculture
of rape and abused authority. More
than a dozen years after the Globe’s
revelations, the public has come to
understand that higher-ups in the Catholic
Church condoned, and even enabled,
the wrongdoing.
Coincidentally, the film will land three
weeks after “Truth,” another much-anticipated
journalism procedural built around
a big news story. But that picture, starring
Cate Blanchett as CBS producer Mary
Mapes and Robert Redford as anchorman
Dan Rather, has the additional challenge
of treading on a decade-old story that still
remains raw. The CBS duo gets a highly
sympathetic hearing in “Truth” (based
on Mapes’ book) while asking moviegoers
to forgive, or at least understand, how the
pair used unverified documents to challenge
then-President George W. Bush’s
service in the Air National Guard. Blowback
is inevitable.
“Spotlight’s” McCarthy, 49, who has
earned acclaim for directing films like
“The Station Agent” and “The Visitor,”
got a taste of the rich possibilities in journalism
as subject matter when he played
a corrupt reporter in the fifth season
of HBO crime series “The Wire.” McCarthy
says that the show’s creator, David
Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter,
“imbued me with a feeling for the importance
of that kind of blue-collar approach,
that roll-up-your-sleeves quality, that insatiable
desire to get to the truth that great
The best way to show the continuing importance of journalism
is to just show great local journalism. And both this story
and Watergate started as great local journalism.” Josh Singer
journalists have.”
Novelist and freelance journalist David
Mizner pitched the Spotlight concept to
producers Nicole Rocklin and Blye Faust
in 2011. They then teamed with Michael
Sugar and Steve Golin of Anonymous
Content, and the group hired McCarthy
who, in turn, brought on fellow writer
Singer (who penned the Julian Assange
biopic “The Fifth Estate”).
The filmmakers took the lead for “Spotlight’s”
narrative structure from their subjects.
There would be no star, but rather
an ensemble — reporters Mike Rezendes
(Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (McAdams) and
Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James), led by
Spotlight editor Walter “Robby” Robinson
(Keaton). They would be set on their
path, and inspired, by a new editor, Martin
“Marty” Baron (Schreiber), who from
his first day on the job asked a simple
question: Why hadn’t the Globe focused
its full attention on years of reports about
sexually abusive priests?
“After sitting with all of these really
interesting people,” McCarthy recalls,
“Josh and I committed: ‘Let’s just trust
the story’— how layered, how compelling
and how textured it was.”
The filmmakers morphed into something
like their subjects in the months
preceding the shoot. They pored over
accounts about troubles in the newspaper
business, reviewed the more than
Absence of Malice
(1981)
$40.7m
Paul Newman and
Sally Field topline
Sydney Pollack’s
thriller about a
reporter who
helps a businessman
prove his innocence.
Newman,
supporting actress
Melinda Dillon and
scribe Kurt Luedtke
earned Oscar noms.
The Paper
(1994)
$38.8m
“Spotlight’s” Michael
Keaton stars as an
editor who battles
with his boss (Glenn
Close) to stop publication
of an inaccurate
story in Ron
Howard’s dramedy.
Randy Newman’s
song “Make Up Your
Mind” was nommed.
DOMESTIC GROSSES