Movie Being Made About an Alum’s Scandalous Career-
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"His lawyers admitted that he made it up," Penenberg said.
Even Scott Calvert, College '94, thought Glass' articles were somewhat unbelievable.
"I would read his stories in TNR and they just seemed too good to be true," Calvert said.
Bissinger -- a Penn and DP alumnus-- said that the article was actually sold to HBO right after it came out.
However, even though HBO never made the article into a TV movie, Bissinger thinks it will definitely get made this time.
Lions Gate Films media spokesman Peter Wilkes confirmed that Lions Gate is producing and distributing Shattered Glass, which is also the name of the movie.
And as of last week Greg Kinnear signed on to play the role of Charles Lane, TNR's editor at the time Glass had fully and partially fabricated 27 of the 41 stories he wrote for the publication.
Bissinger, who has read the script, finds it to be very faithful to his own article. However, Ray said that the script would be supplemented by his own research as well.
"It's an improbable tale of a young guy that is very popular and seems to be perfect on the outside, but was ripping off the system left and right," Bissinger said.
Bissinger also thinks it is a story that should be remembered even though he believes it tarnished the journalism profession.
"Here is my prediction -- straight to video, it won't see the light of day," he said.
But Bissinger thinks that the movie will be a pot boiler since he considers it to be a film about espionage.
However, others feel that the Glass scandal does not even deserve to be projected onto the big screen.
"I'm a little appalled," Roxanne Patel, College '93, said. "As a journalist I am disturbed that his behavior is deemed sexy enough that they want to make a movie about it. There's a degree of notoriety about it that bothers me."
Although Glass, College '94, may have destroyed his own credibility, reputation and career, everyone who knew him before the incident occurred remembers him as an entirely different person.
"He was an amazing reporter. That's what is the shame of the whole thing," Baer, a DP colleague of Glass', said. "Steve is incredibly smart, worked incredibly hard and was really driven."
"I was flabbergasted just because I had never known Steve to do anything like that," Calvert said.
However, looking back, several DP colleagues saw some possible warning signs that Glass' career could go awry.
"He was almost too serious about his journalistic mission," Calvert reflected.
But Glass' character seemed to have drastically changed once it was revealed that he had been fabricating articles.
"As we de-bunked ['Hack Heaven'] he would lie... and come up with another source, another lie," Penenberg said.
Lane, among many others, had also been deceived by Glass.
"I caught him in a bunch of lies. He told a bunch of things to my face that were not true," Lane said. "He faked a website and showed me someone's fake business card."
Lane -- now a reporter for The Washington Post -- was never able to make Glass confess to fabricating "Hack Heaven." Instead, Glass only revealed information to his lawyer.
Glass went on to graduate from Georgetown Law School and is now living in New York, according to Spiegel. However, he is not a registered practicing lawyer.
Glass did not respond to any emails or a phone call to his parents' home.
And while Glass' actions have brought him significant notoriety, some feel sorry that he will not be able to live a life without constant scrutiny.
"I don't think Steve is an evil person at all. I don't know why he did what he did, but, hopefully, he is coming to terms with that," Baer said. _________________________________________________________________________
“IT’S A CAUTIONARY TALE about the difference between being a good reporter and a hot one,” he says, comparing “the Woodward and Bernstein types who ground out a story and got famous, as opposed to the generation of reporters today trying to get the same level of fame but not doing the same amount of work.”
Now that shooting has wrapped on “Shattered Glass” (with a day in Washington last week after most of the filming in Montreal), it’s worth pondering how Hollywood handles the issue of journalistic ethics in what purports to be a nonfiction work. After all, millions of people probably think of Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee after the Watergate film “All the President’s Men,” and of Christopher Plummer as Mike Wallace after “The Insider” chronicled the battle between “60 Minutes” and the tobacco industry.
MANY FABRICATIONS
The plot first unfolded in the press in 1998. Charles Lane, then the New Republic’s editor, fired Glass, then 25, after painstakingly discovering that he had invented a teenage computer hacker — this after Glass had created a phony Web site for the fictitious company supposedly penetrated by the hacker. Fabrications were found in more than two dozen other New Republic pieces by Glass.
Lane (played by Peter Sarsgaard) is clearly the script’s hero. “You think you’re seeing a movie about Stephen Glass, and you realize halfway through you’re seeing a movie about Chuck Lane,” Ray says.
Ray and producer Craig Baumgarten insist the film is faithful to transcribed interviews with the people involved. “We’re putting ourselves up to a very difficult standard for a movie,” Baumgarten says. “We can’t falsify or invent or homogenize the story in any way.”
Executive Producer Alan Merims says: “It’s always harder to do a story that’s not made up of whole cloth. There were discussions about what is it appropriate to stylize and not.” Some of the players “said, ‘I don’t like the way I am in this scene,’ but you can’t listen to that.”
COMMITMENT TO ACCURACY
Lane, who is now a Washington Post reporter and helped vet the script, praises the filmmakers’ commitment to accuracy. “There are incidents that occur in the movie that didn’t occur in real life, just to kind of keep the plot going,” he acknowledges. “They have warm and fuzzy scenes with me and my wife that didn’t happen. They have me having conversations with various people that occurred in different places and the words were all different. Another dilemma: Glass, who graduated from Georgetown Law School two years ago, refused to cooperate, so a scene in which he calls his parents is, shall we say, inferred. A female New Republic staffer played by Chloe Sevigny, though based loosely on Hanna Rosin (now also at The Post), is a composite; a male staffer is reincarnated as a woman, and there’s a fictional intern. Ray sees these as acceptable cinematic compromises.
As for the impact on Glass, who has never publicly discussed his journalistic fiction, “I don’t celebrate in any way the idea that this movie will cause this guy pain and embarrassment,” Ray says. “I regret that. But it’s a story we all felt should be told. I don’t know how to make this movie without naming Stephen Glass. That would have felt very cheap. It would have been wildly ironic to make this movie with fake names.”
Will the Lions Gate film, to be released next year, be boffo at the box office? In a tale about bogus notes and fooling fact-checkers, about the only action scene is when Lane takes Glass on a drive through Bethesda to try to find the software company that is a figment of the writer’s imagination.
“Whenever you make a movie that doesn’t have things blowing up in it, you worry about whether people will go see it,” Ray says. “If we limited ourselves to readers of the New Republic, we’d be in a lot of trouble. But if we do it right, the movie will be good.”
Penn and Daily Pennsylvanian alumnus Stephen Glass' shattered career as a rising superstar journalist is going to break into movie theaters next year.
Lions Gate Films is now making a movie based upon Buzz Bissinger's story entitled Shattered Glass, an account of Glass' full and partial fabrication of nearly half the articles that he wrote for The New Republic.
Hayden Christensen -- who played the young Darth Vader in Star Wars Episode II: The Attack of the Clones -- will be starring as Glass. And Director of the film Billy Ray will begin shooting in August.
Investigative journalist Adam Penenberg broke the story in 1998 that Glass -- who was The Daily Pennsylvanian Executive Editor in 1993 -- had fabricated a story entitled "Hack Heaven" for TNR.
And many said that Glass was the last person they would have expected to do such a thing.Stephen Glass: The true story
on film, New Republic’s infamous inventor
By Howard Kurtz
THE WASHINGTON POST
Oct. 7 — Director Billy Ray hadn’t even finished shooting his movie about fabricating journalist Stephen Glass when he read that he was glamorizing a media villain. “Normally films have to come out to get a bad review,” Ray says. New York Daily News critic Jack Mathews wrote that Ray “undoubtedly sees some harmless romanticism in a guy who could so easily fool seasoned magazine pros.” But Ray, who cast Hayden Christensen (of recent “Star Wars” fame) as the disgraced New Republic writer, views it differently.
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