| Dreamworks Drops Catholic Priest Movie As Producers Shop Elsewhere
By Borys Kit
Hollywood Reporter
June 13, 2013
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/dreamworks-drops-catholic-priest-movie-568563
DreamWorks is quietly parting ways with the untitled movie project that chronicles the Catholic Church's decades-long cover-up of its pedophile priests in Massachusetts as uncovered during a yearlong investigation by the Boston Globe.
Participant Media, which remains a co-financier, and producers Michael Sugar and Steve Golin of Anonymous Content and Rocklin/Faust's Nicole Rocklin and Blye Faust are now shopping the project, which has Tom McCarthy attached to direct.
Multiple suitors are already lined up and the prestigious nature of the project will surely lock this up.
The movie project tells of how the Globe’s “Spotlight Team” reporters spent a year interviewing victims and reviewing thousands of pages of documents and discovered years of cover-up by Church leadership. Their reporting eventually led to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law, who had hidden years of serial abuse by other priests, and opened the floodgates to revelations of molestation and cover-ups worldwide that still reverberate today.
The Globe team won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service "for its courageous, comprehensive coverage of sexual abuse by priests, an effort that pierced secrecy; stirred local, national and international reaction; and produced changes in the Roman Catholic Church."
The parting is described as amicable; DreamWorks and the producers are working together on the upcoming WikiLeaks movie The Fifth Estate.
Josh Singer wrote the script to the project, which has been described as tonally in the vein of All the President’s Men.
David Mizner is serving as a consultant and associate producer, while Jonathan King and Jeff Skoll are executive producing.
|