okay here's a question for you how do
you tell a story about telling a story
that was the creative challenge facing
the filmmakers of the 2015 Best Picture
winner spotlight a movie about an
investigative reporting team at the
Boston Globe who exposed systematic
child sex abuse by Catholic priests in
the Boston area the kind of storytelling
in question is journalism specifically
print journalism even more specifically
investigative print journalism what
director Tom McCarthy and his team
wanted to do was capture this kind of
storytelling as honestly as possible to
show what it really looks like when it's
done right once we settle on a project
we spend it your more investigating
investigative reporting can be a long
and tedious process full of dead ends
and monotonous tasks in other words it
can be boring that doesn't mean the
results are boring or that there aren't
moments of intensity in the reporting
only that the kind of journalism that
produces stories like the one in
spotlight involves a lot of mind-numbing
work in fact the ability to engage in
that kind of tedium is I think an
essential feature of investigative
journalism and that poses a problem for
anybody who might want to capture the
profession on film as it really is as
soon as there were movies there were
movies about reporters the first time
Charlie Chaplin ever appeared on-screen
in 1914 he played a swindler
impersonating a journalist in 1919 Harry
Houdini played a newspaper reporter who
is wrongly accused of murder and must
make a series of daring escapes in order
to find the real killer already in the
silent film era stereotypes start to
form of news people that are still
recognizable today of the intrepid
crusading journalist who like the
detective often uses questionable
tactics to land the big scoop or expose
the corruption
of the rich and powerful in these films
rights historian Howard good journalists
were by turns idealists and heart and
cynics Crusaders and midnight
conspirators our attitude toward them
continually swings from dark to bright
and back again this complicated
stereotype carried right into the
talkies the reporters in Howard Hawks
1940 classic his girl Friday embody all
these qualities perfectly they are
wisecracking and world weary sometimes
nasty and unscrupulous yet they fight
for the truth and the little guy against
the powers that be and the decades that
followed journalists on film were
sometimes heroes like Humphrey Bogart in
deadline USA and sometimes villains like
Kirk Douglas in ace in the hole or Burt
Lancaster and Tony Curtis in sweet smell
of success whether the reasons were good
or bad though reporters were always
willing to do whatever it took to get
the story for a brief time in the late
70s journalists became superheroes the
closest predecessor to spotlight is of
course Alan Peck EULA's all the
president's men about Bob Woodward and
Carl Bernstein peeling back the layers
of the Watergate scandal investigative
reporters were the perfect heroes for a
paranoid era shining the light of truth
into the dark corners of power with the
help of master cinematographer Gordon
Willis Pecola visualized this antagonism
by making the Washington Post newsroom a
place of bright light and deep focus
within a city
absolutely draped in shadow like
spotlight all the President's Men is
less about this story at the heart of
the film in this case Watergate and more
about the process the movie popularized
the phrase and though that's a great
line in practice following the money is
in all that exciting it involves a lot
of paperwork and cross-referencing
searching for people's contact
information dealing with bureaucrats
knocking on doors verifying and re
verifying that is the real unglamorous
daily slog of a report
and if you don't communicate that in a
movie about journalism you haven't
really done what you set out to do you
haven't really depicted journalism but
you can't make a movie boring just so
that it's authentic
the challenge for Pak Allah and 40 years
later for Tom McCarthy is to dramatize
the undramatic one way to do that is by
using montage
even though montages can be cliche they
are still a useful tool for conveying
effort over long periods in spotlight a
key development in the investigation
occurs when reporters discover pedophile
priests are being classified as being on
sick leave in church directories so they
scrub years and years of these
directories to identify priests with
that designation tracking what they find
in a spreadsheet now there's nothing
exciting about inputting data into Excel
but a montage allows McCarthy to show
this crucial part of the investigation
in a lively way while also conveying the
feeling of drudgery it required another
tool and by definition a less
appreciated one is understatement
spotlight uses this even more than all
the president's men the whole film is d
stylized the cinematography is simple
the color palette is muted the
production and costume design messy and
modest Howard Shores score isn't
in-your-face and it's used sparingly
McCarthy's Direction doesn't call
attention to itself his camera moves are
functional inconspicuous now this isn't
a knock on the people who worked on
these things the opposite in fact it
takes just as much art to create a
reserved aesthetic as it does to create
a stylized one it's going to get a lot
less attention but that's the point the
understated tone of spotlight from the
performances to the visuals to the music
serves the story perfectly it tells us
something vital about the nature of good
journalism that the work is sober and
its practitioners meticulous that some
deeply important truths only exist on
the other side of months or years of
unglamorous reporting it's a hard tone
to get exactly right a few years after
spotlight Spielberg made the post which
has the same goals but I think that
leans a little too far
into righteousness to the point where
this newsroom aesthetic became
susceptible to parity newspaper movie
featuring men in bad ties and
short-sleeved colored shirts gross
styrofoam coffee cups and you can bet
your sweet ass there's a scene with a
very long pregnant pause while everyone
waits for the editor to say let's let's
go let's let's do it let's let's let's
go let's go let's go let's let's publish
like anything else it's important to
capture journalism honestly when we see
what reporting really looks like we
better understand what resources are
required for the best version of it to
thrive spotlight shows us what the gold
standard is to quote David Simon crater
of the wire it's a bunch of people who
go out and acquire information in a
systemic way and then bring it back to a
collective of people with real
experience and real institutional memory
who have an understanding of the
continuity and context of issues and can
determine the news value and publish it
accordingly and getting that complex and
nuanced message through in a two-hour
movie is impressive then again
journalists do that kind of thing all
the time
hey everybody thank you so much for
watching this episode was brought to you
by Amazon Studios and the Amazon
original film the report starring Adam
driver and net Bening and Jon Hamm thank
you to Amazon Studios for sponsoring
this video and agreeing like all my
other sponsors to let me have full
creative control on this piece Amazon
actually sent me the report a couple
months ago and I really liked it it's
powerful work from writer director Scott
Z burns and everybody involved and
though it's not a movie about journalism
it has a lot of the same thriller and
investigative elements as all the
President's Men and spotlight critics
have called the movie gripping and
eye-opening a portrait of American
heroism and festival crowds where it's
played seem to really like it as well
the report is out now in select theaters
and available on Amazon Prime video
across the globe November 29th for
ticketing and more information about
this film from writer director and
producer Scott Z burns go to amazon.com
slash the report movie thanks guys I'll
see you next time