The Richard Jewell Story

Clint Eastwood, who up until now has been a first-rate director, has disgraced himself with his latest effort, "Richard Jewell". His film casts Jewell as a hero who saved many lives, and then was unfairly maligned in the media because the FBI had fingered him as the main suspect.

Eastwood shows the reporter from the Atlanta Journal Constitution as getting the story by sleeping with the FBI agent heading up the investigation. That is to say, he uses the same sort of character assassination techniques on the reporter which he accuses the media of doing to Jewell.

Richard Jewell was a fat, unemployed, 30-year-old sleeping on his mother's couch at the time of the Atlanta Olympics. He got temporary work as security during the Olympics, but basically he was a bum.

Jewell later sued, even though the reporting that he was a suspect was true reporting. The major media outlets in the suit settled, but the Atlanta paper, to its everlasting credit, refused to give in to Jewell's blackmail and took it to trial and won. Kudos to them, and boos and hisses to Eastwood.

A good movie could have been made about this, one that made the Atlanta paper out to be the hero, not Jewell. Truth is a defense to a defamation suit, a reality which people in this sue-happy country should bear in mind.

12/27/19 update.  Eastwood's movie has totally flopped at the box office. The studio continues to advertise the film on TV, but that is just throwing good money after bad.

The tragedy with this flop of a movie is that a good movie can usually be made from the truth, without making up salacious details as Eastwood did.  The 1988 film "Mississippi Burning" suffered from the same twisting of historical facts, the lie here being that the FBI learned of the location of the bodies of the three slain civil rights workers through an agent, played by Gene Hackman, romancing the wife of a sheriff's deputy. In reality, the truth was learned through the payment of $30,000 to an informant.

A movie true to real-life facts is "The Great Escape", which is based on a book of the same name. The facts seem so far-fetched that one suspects some are made up, but I found out in recent years that it is actually the other way around: the author insisted that the movie be true to the facts in the book, before he would agree to a movie being made.

Another example is "Donnie Brasco", which has little details which make it come alive with a real-life feel to it.