Richard Jewell. From Hero to Hounded.
Go see “Richard Jewell.”
I mean it. It may not be a traditional Christmas movie, but it needs to be seen and by a large audience. At the 7:15 showing at the Beach Cinema and Ale House on Saturday there were about 15 people in the theater.
Not good.
There were empty seats across the country. The Hollywood Reporter says opening weekend for “Richard Jewell” has been a box office disaster, bringing in just $5 million.
The film is based on actual events involving Richard Jewell, the hapless security guard who was falsely accused of being the 1996 Olympic bomber. Director Clint Eastwood shows what happens when unethical law enforcement and sensational news reporting combine to fuel a national feeding frenzy.
In reality, Richard Jewell was an accidental hero. A guy who saved countless lives after he found a bomb planted in Atlanta’s Centennial Park, alerted the police and helped evacuate the area. For a few days he was feted by the national media for his actions.
But because Jewell’s rather oddball life fit the profile of the “lone bomber” - overweight white guy, living at home with his mother, a cop wannabe - the FBI quickly homed in on him and leaked their suspicions to a reckless press.
What ensued was a nightmare for Jewell and his mother.
There’s simply no defending the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s news judgment in the aftermath of the bombing. The paper cavalierly printed stories naming Richard Jewell as the suspect with the flimsiest of sourcing. The rest of the media followed.
In December of 1996, a few months after Jewell was cleared, Atlanta Magazine published a scathing piece headlined “Presumed Guilty” about the horrific treatment of the Atlanta man. In it, Howard Kurtz, then the The Washington Post media critic, denounced the behavior of the press.
“I think the media’s performance has been downright embarrassing,” said Kurtz. “Every news organization in the country has contributed to ruining this guy’s life without the faintest idea of whether he’s guilty or innocent.”
Instead of hanging its head in shame, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has launched what’s been called a “war” on Eastwood’s film, objecting to the portrayal of Kathy Scruggs as a female reporter who flirts with sources. Scruggs died of a drug overdose in 2001.
The newspaper focused on one short scene in the movie where it’s implied that Scruggs may have had sex with a source.
Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. What’s not in dispute is that Scruggs enjoyed a colorful reputation as an aggressive, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking police reporter. She broke the Jewell-as-suspect story and her editors ran with it.
Apparently movies about newspapers are only acceptable if reporters are portrayed as honorable crusaders as they were in “All The President’s Men” or more recently, “Spotlight.”
Fact is, this film isn’t really about Scruggs. It’s about the entire national press corps that vilified Jewell without any evidence. In the span of a week he ceased being an American who enjoyed the presumption of innocence and was instead widely presumed to be a terrorist.
Shoot, Jay Leno, then host of the Tonight show called him the “una-doofus” on national TV.
The Jewell case ought to be studied. There are lessons to be learned from it. Yet some in the media are offended because they believe the film feeds today’s narrative that the press is full of fake news.
Take the Philadelphia Inquirer, for instance, which published this: “Clint Eastwood’s ‘Richard Jewell’ Is the Movie America Doesn’t Need Right Now,” by an actual columnist who urged readers not to see the film and referred to what happened to Richard Jewell as “a heartbreaking flub.”
A flub?
Nice try.
Ignore the Inquirer. Go see this movie. It’s a cautionary tale about power-drunk press and dishonest law enforcement.
Who knows, you may find some modern parallels.
