Schreiber’s Take on the 5th Estate
By Pam Grady
When he hasn’t been busy playing fixer Ray Donovan on the eponymous Showtime series, Liev Schreiber has made a cottage industry lately of playing real people: President Lyndon Johnson in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” Soviet chess champion Boris Spassky in “Pawn Sacrifice,” and now “Boston Globe” editor Marty Baron in one of the most highly anticipated dramas of the fall season, Tom McCarthy’s “Spotlight.” “I hate playing people who actually lived,” Schreiber, 48, says. “It’s too much responsibility, but what I learned playing Hamlet is that if you pick smart roles, people will think you’re smart.” Early award winner Modesty aside, the actor was sharp enough to spot a winner when he accepted the role of Baron. One of the few films to live up to the hype when it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, “Spotlight” is also an early award winner, picking up two prizes at the Venice Film Festival, where it made its world premiere; a screenwriting award at the Hollywood Film Festival; and most recently, the Audience Favorite Gold Award, US Cinema, at the Mill Valley Film Festival. “Spotlight” is the story of how a group of investigative journalists at the Boston Globe in 2002 broke open wide the story of sexual abuse by Catholic priests and the church’s longtime practice of covering up the crimes. The Globe’s Spotlight team focused on their local parishes, but the story reverberated worldwide. Baron was the outsider, an editor brought in by the paper’s new parent, the New York Times, and the man who recognized the importance of the story and urged his reporters to pursue it. “Baron’s very different from everyone else,” says McCarthy. “And day one, at that first 10:30 meeting, he sort of picks up on a piece of reporting that came from within the Globe, which I think is important to remember. It was a column by Eileen McNamara. He just sort of asked some simple questions and it unlocked what became this massive investigation. That, to me, was just so compelling.” “I think Marty is a true American hero, and I think Marty did a remarkable job shepherding that team of journalists,” adds Schreiber. “And he’s always been very good at it, he’s asking the right questions and finding the right story and not being afraid to challenge powerful institutions and organizations.” McCarthy and Schreiber attended Yale Drama School together back in the 1990s. But while McCarthy, too, is an actor, whose credits include “Syriana,” “Flags of Our Fathers” and the role of reporter Scott Templeton in the final season of “The Wire,” he’s found bigger success as a writer-director of such films as “The Station Agent” and “The Visitor.” “Spotlight” is his fifth feature, and as he filled his cast with an ensemble that includes Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Brian D’Arcy James as the Spotlight team, when it came to casting Baron, he thought of his classmate. “There’s a real, quiet stillness, and both men have really sharp minds,” McCarthy says. “I just felt like he would capture that. Marty is a unique person and character and a tremendous editor. It was exciting to see Liev become him. He really captured the strength and conviction and single-mindedness of Marty Baron.” Read the screenplay McCarthy didn’t approach Schreiber with an offer right away, instead asking the actor to read the screenplay he’d written with Josh Singer and to give his opinion on it. Schreiber was under the impression that he was simply doing a favor for an old friend. “I started to read it and I was immediately blown away by it,” Schreiber says. “I just thought it was an incredible piece of writing. I called him and I told him, ‘This is really amazing.’ It was not so much the church scandal, but because of what’s happening to journalism in America right now. This really felt like a very thoughtful and restrained and intelligent love letter to investigative journalism. “Nobody else seemed to be saying anything about it, really, that had any great impact. I told him how jealous I was, actually, and he said, ‘Well, how do you feel about playing Marty Baron?’ I was thrilled. I don’t think I’ve been that excited in years about doing anything.” The work lived up to the actor’s anticipation. As a director, McCarthy was certain of his vision, and Schreiber trusted him. But more than that, he was impressed by McCarthy’s approach to storytelling and his singular handle on his film. “A lot of people would tell that story differently,” says Schreiber. “I think a lot of people would have gone for big emotional moments and suspense elements and pyrotechnics. What he did was so restrained and so intelligent and so faithful to the story and what was important. I was just very impressed. “I love the minutiae, the woman going down into the basement of the Boston Globe with the trolley, pulling cardboard boxes full of manila folders with newspaper clippings in them. That detail and that respect and the attention to the laborious nature of this work and the long-form work that these journalists do is just really evocative to me, as evocative as a car chase.” As it’s made the festival rounds, “Spotlight” has been receiving favorable comparisons to another story of journalists and a newspaper breaking open an earthshaking story, Alan J. Pakula’s classic 1976 thriller “All the President’s Men.” Pakula’s Watergate era film stands as a testament to the power of the press. “Spotlight” is coming out in a very different era, at a time of slashed newsroom budgets, a fact not lost on Schreiber or McCarthy. “How many Spotlights are there is a good question,” Schreiber says. “How do we support them and how do we get them the resources that they need to do the job that we need them to do as a culture and a society? That’s what’s really scary, I think, about this film and this story, because unless people are spending money and investing resources into long-lead investigative journalism — there are states in this country where the state legislature doesn’t have a regular beat, the mayors don’t have a regular beat, and if they do have a regular beat, what kind of resources do they have to do the long-lead stuff, like what these guys did? Hold them accountable “And how impossible that can be and how important that stuff is to hold these powerful people and these institutions accountable. It’s just a deeply important part of our society and culture and democracy.” “This was happening in cities all over the world, but who wants to talk about this?” adds McCarthy. “Who wants to sit around the kitchen table and talk about child abuse and rape, especially at the hands of priests, and a possible church cover-up? And who has the time to really look into it? That’s why we need journalists.” Pam Grady is a freelance writer. E-mail: sadolphson@sfchronicle.com Spotlight (rated R) opens at Bay Area theaters on Friday, Nov. 13.
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