By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Spotlight Wins LA Press Club’s Veritas Award

Posted Thursday, February 18th, 2016 - Comments Off on Spotlight Wins LA Press Club’s Veritas Award
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HOLLYWOOD, CA, February 18, 2016: The Los Angeles Press Club is both proud and excited to announce the winner of its first ever Veritas Award for the Best Film Based on or Inspired by Real Events and People.  This new award is judged by members of the LAPC—based equally upon fidelity of subject matter and artistic excellence and hopefully will become a longstanding tradition. 
 
The clear-cut winner for 2015, determined by a membership vote, is Spotlight written by Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy and directed by McCarthy; Bridge of Spies was voted runner-up.
 
“We are honored and thrilled to have received the inaugural Veritas Award from the LA Press Club — especially given that it’s been such a great year for films based on true stories. Of course, any award from the LA Press Club is an honor, as the club has been supporting, promoting and defending journalism in Southern California for over a century. And we’re thrilled that they choose to award a film that celebrates incredible journalism. With the challenges the profession has confronted in this century, we hope this award helps to increase awareness of the need for local investigative journalism here in Southern California, around the country and around the world,” said the Spotlight filmmakers in a joint statement.
 
Spotlight is the true story of how the Boston Globe’s investigative team uncovered the massive child molestation scandal and cover-up within the Boston Catholic Archdiocese. The film follows the procedural and journalistic groundwork initiated by the Globe’s Editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) and overseen by Assistant Managing Editor Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery) and spearheaded by supervising editor, Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton) and their reporters: Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James)—all of whom from Catholic backgrounds and having their own mixed feelings about what they’re doing. The powerful political forces trying to bury the truth are confronted and defeated by reporters doing their job in perhaps the most authentic exposé since Woodward and Bernstein’s All The President’s Men.
 
“It seems only fitting our members would choose Spotlight for our inaugural Vertitas Award—a film based on an explosive piece of investigative journalism that explores the process to get it to print,” said LA Press Club President Robert Kovacik, Anchor/Reporter of NBC4 Southern California.  
 
WHAT: The Veritas Award
WHEN: Thursday, February 25 at 6 pm (cocktails & red carpet), 7 pm program
WHERE: Los Angeles Press Club @ The Steve Allen Theater, 4773 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, 90027 (2 blocks west of Vermont)
WHO: The real Boston Globe heroes Sacha Pfeiffer, Ben Bradlee, Jr. and Mike Rezendes, along with surprise guests—check LApressclub.org for updates on participants.
HOSTS: Robert Kovacik, NBC4 SoCal and Patt Morrison, LA Times
Hosted Bar.
COST: Free for LA Press Club Members (Join LAPC-link). $20 for all others. R.S.V.P a must.
PARKING: Free, enter from Berendo
METRO: Red line, Sunset/Vermont
 
The Los Angeles Press Club stands as an organization devoted to improving the spirit of journalism and journalists, raising the industry’s standards, strengthening its integrity and improving its reputation all for the benefit of the community at large. Serving the Southland since 1913, it is the only Southern California journalism group that speaks for all journalists working for daily and weekly newspapers, radio & TV, magazines, documentary films and online.
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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon