Tom Mccarthy to Helm Boston Globe Project

By Jeff Sneider
The Variety
October 19, 2012

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118060938?refCatId=13


"Win Win" helmer Tom McCarthy and scribe Josh Singer ("The West Wing") have boarded Anonymous Content and Rocklin/Faust's untitled Boston Globe project, which follows the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who exposed the Catholic Church's decades-long cover-up of child molestation in Massachusetts.

Due to the sensitivity of the subject matter, McCarthy has been working in secret for more than a year on the project that chronicles the worldwide scandal.

Steve Golin and Michael Sugar of Anonymous Content are producing with Nicole Rocklin and Blye Faust. David Mizner, who brought the project to Rocklin/Faust, will consult and serve as an associate producer.

Producers have secured life rights of the Globe reporters responsible, including Spotlight Team members Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer and Matt Carroll, Spotlight Team editor Walter "Robby" Robinson, special projects editor Ben Bradlee Jr. and Globe editor Marty Baron.

When Baron saw an article in the Globe just after starting as editor about a Boston priest who had molested children, he realized a bigger story could lie behind it. He spurred a team of reporters to spend a year interviewing scores of victims and poring over thousands of pages of documents.

The Globe team eventually discovered that Cardinal Bernard Law had hidden years of serial abuse by moving guilty priests from one parish to another, where they often abused again.

The team's articles won them the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for meritorious public service and set off a tidal wave of revelations around the world.

Project, which was announced in April 2010 and described as in the vein of the classic journalism pic "All the President's Men," is being developed inhouse and has not yet been exposed to studios or financiers. While there are no actors currently attached to the pic, at least one A-list star has expressed interest in the material.

Bradlee Jr. is the son of legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who stood behind Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein when their Watergate reporting was assailed by President Richard Nixon and his White House staff.

McCarthy, who wrote and directed both "The Station Agent" and "The Visitor," most recently co-wrote and directed "Win Win" for Fox Searchlight. He was nominated for an Oscar for co-creating the story of Pixar's "Up," and he has the unique baseball pic "Million Dollar Arm" in the works for Disney and Mayhem Pictures. McCarthy is repped by the Gersh Agency and attorney Andrew Hurwitz.

Singer is a veteran TV scribe who has started gaining heat in the feature world, having written the untitled Julian Assange/Wikileaks project in development at DreamWorks. He started out writing on "The West Wing" and went on to write and produce numerous episodes of "Law & Order: SVU," "Lie to Me" and "Fringe." He's repped by WME and Anonymous Content.