Cinematheque Screening Series: Spotlight

Last week, the real-life reporters portrayed by A-list talent in the new film Spotlight celebrated how well the film stuck to the facts about the Boston Globe Spotlight team’s investigation of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston’s decades long cover-up of pedophile priests. The film opens today nationwide.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning reporters—Sacha Pfeiffer (MET’94, SED’12), Mike Rezendes (CAS’78), Matt Carroll, Walter V. Robinson, and Ben Bradlee, Jr.—fielded questions after the film was screened to an audience of College of Communication students and faculty at the AMC Loews Boston Common. The event was part of COM’s Cinematheque series, which brings accomplished filmmakers to campus to screen and discuss their work.

“What you saw in two hours was five months of our work,” said Pfeiffer, who recently returned to the Globe after a stint at WBUR, BU’s National Public Radio station. “Obviously you have to take a little bit of dramatic license, you need to speed things up, take three different scenes and put them into one. There are times where there’s a talk on the golf course, when in reality it probably happened on the telephone, but a two-hour movie of telephone calls isn’t going to be very interesting. I think we were all very impressed with how closely they stayed to what authentically happened.”

In 2002, the Spotlight team published an explosive story claiming that the archdiocese knew that priest John J. Geoghan had been sexually abusing children for decades. Yet instead of turning him in to face prosecution, the paper reported, the Church several times moved Geoghan to different parishes and assured parents that he wouldn’t be allowed to repeat his crimes. The Globe’s reporting showed that many in the Boston community—including other priests, parents, teachers, and law enforcement—knew of the abuse, but their devotion to their religion deterred them from exposing the crimes.