The Press Box - The 20th Anniversary of 'Shattered Glass' with Writer-Director Billy Ray

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Bryan is joined by Billy Ray, writer and director of ‘Shattered Glass,’ a movie that covers the Stephen Glass New Republic scandal, for the 20th anniversary of its release. They discuss Ray’s experience transitioning from writer to director, how he cast Hayden Christensen as the lead, what it was like writing for a protagonist such as Glass, how Tom Cruise received a producer credit, and much more! Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Billy Ray Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just follow the Ringer MMA show on your Spotify app. So you don't miss an episode. We'll talk to you then. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to a summer vacation edition of the press box. Brian Curtis of The Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes. If you don't me, you know I'm interested in movies about journalists. Well, this is the 20th anniversary of writer-director Billy Ray's movie Shattered Glass,

which belongs in the modern journalism movie pantheon. The movie is about Stephen Glass, this wonderkin, new, Republic writer who had a knack for reporting incredible stories. Except that Glass was making up a lot of the details, as a Forbes reporter and then Glass's own editor would learn, leading to a huge scandal. Stephen Glass is the very best part that Hayden Christensen ever played the movies, and yes, I am including Anakin Skywalker on that list. Billy Ray, for his part, did a skillful job, taking a story that occurs mostly in Glass's mind

and making a movie that's really about this inner office faceoff, between Glass and the New Republic's editor, Chuck Lane, what Ray once described as the least popular kid in school, squaring off against the most popular kid. Are you mad at me, Chuck? As you might have heard me say before, my very first job in journalism was at the New Republic, two years after the events in this movie.

And back in 2003, I watched Shattered Glass, and I thought, I recognized that center-left magazine. I know those staff meetings. I know that naked ambition. So back in April, I met Billy Ray on the Paramount Lot to talk about how he adapted a Buzz Bissinger magazine story, how he cast actors like Hayden Christensen and Chloe 70, and maybe most surprisingly, how Ray struck up a friendship with the real-life Stephen Glass.

Here's Billy Ray on the 20th anniversary of Shattered Glass. All right, Billy, Buzz Bissinger's story about Stephen Glass comes out in the September 1998 issue of Vanity Fair. What about it suggested a movie? Well, first of all, it was sent to me by a producer named Craig Baumgarten, who stayed on for the entire duration of the movie. And he said to me, I just want you to know, you're my second choice for this. Patty Chiafsky was my first.

Patty was long gone by then. So it fell to me. I read it and fell in love with it because I knew the second, I read the line that Bissinger kept writing for Stephen Glass, Are You Mad at Me? I knew I could hang a character just on that line alone. The psychology of that was so specific and so fertile. So we took it to HBO and sold it,

and I was going to get paid by HBO to write. It was going to be an HBO movie initially. And while I was writing it, all the executives at HBO that had hired me were fired. I'm convinced that that's now why I write so far. because I'm trying to make sure that I'm handing it into the people who still ordered it. But anyway, by the time I was done with the script, there was no one at HBO who had ordered the script, no one who was interested in it.

It was sort of an orphan there. And it sat there for two years before we finally tried to take it out and get it made as a feature. I didn't know that before you adapted Shattered Glass, you had adapted Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights. I did. I'm one of a legion of writers who had their hands on Friday Night Lights. And this was before Pete Berg was the director. This is when John Avnet was the director. And that was my first time ever meeting Abnet.

And my first time meeting Brian Grazer, who was the producer, because it was an imagined project. But I loved Friday Night Lights as well. And a couple things of mine actually made it into the movie, but I was one of, I don't know, 12, 13 writers on that movie. What kind of research did you do for the glass screenplay? Oh, exhaustive. You just have to. I mean, if you're going to tell a story about fraudulence and journalism, And you tell it in a fraudulent way, you know, shame on you.

So, you know, got on a plane and went to D.C. and met everybody. Just met, you know, Michael Kelly and Chuck Lane and met, you know, all the people that Glass had worked with at the New Republic. And some of the people that he had worked with outside the New Republic. I met everybody except Glass, tried through his lawyer, tried to reach him. And he wasn't interested in helping me. And I didn't meet Stephen himself until two or three years after the movie was released, which was kind of an epic moment for me. But I didn't meet him until then.

When you first called these journalists and say, I'm writing a movie about Stephen Glass, their reaction was what? Well, it varied. Chuck Lane was extremely cautious, wanting to be helpful, but wanting to make sure that he didn't piss off Marty Parrott, who's his boss, the publisher of the magazine. but Chuck ultimately became a great resource and a very, very dear friend. Michael Kelly was just outright hostile.

I reached out to Michael Kelly, who had been Glass's first editor, and by then was at, I forget which magazine he was, it wasn't the Atlantic, but it was. National Journal. National Journal, thank you. Okay, so I reached out to Michael Kelly, who didn't return my call, and then I called him again, and I happened to catch him at lunch, and so he answered. And I said, my name's Billy Ray, and I'm going to be adapting BuzzBub, messenger's article. And Michael said to me, I just want to tell you something. What Buzz wrote about me

was false. It was provably false. And if you do to me, what he did to me, I'll sue you. Wow. That was hello. And I said, well, okay, Mr. Kelly, let's pretend I'm a journalist for a second. Educate me. Set the record straight. What happened? And he and I wound up becoming very, very, very good friends. When I went to D.C., part of my research trip, I was having these horrible allergies, and it was Michael Kelly who gave me clareton. And he became a nurturing friend. And that was a terrible loss.

He died in Iraq covering Operation Desert Storm. No, not just a storm, but Iraqi Freedom. Iraqi Freedom. And I was in a car that overturned in water. And, you know, my hope had always been that my movie premiere would be the moment when Chuck Lane and Michael Kelly regained their friendship because they were both portrayed very flatteringly in the film. And they never got that opportunity. This is 1999 when you're making these phone calls. Yeah, the article was in 1998, right?

Right. Okay. So I went out to D.C., went to the D.C. correspondence dinner. I honestly don't remember if it was 98 or 99. It was one of those two years. It was a Clinton year. But it's very fresh, this incident in these people's minds. Oh, very much so.

And wrote the script as fast as I could. And then as I said, it languished for two years. So didn't actually get a chance to make it until 2002. You briefly went to J school at Medill at Northwestern? I went to Northwestern as a freshman to be in the Medill School. and I went into a freshman writing class, fall quarter, the only C I ever got in college, with a teacher. I remember her name being Meg Thayer, but I'd have to look that up. But she said to me, you will never be a writer.

So you researching the glass screenplay. This is you being a reporter in a sense. I've approached every true story I've written like a reporter, whether it was Richard Jule or Breach or the Comey rule or Captain Phillips. They're all true stories. You have to approach them like a journalist. You bring your notebook and you interview the people who were there. You put yourself at the feet of people who know more than you do.

And you take notes and you try to ask, you know, interesting questions. You know, like Stephen Glass says at the beginning of Shattered Glass, journalism is the art of capturing human behavior. And that's what you're trying to do. So here's my editor's question for you. At this early stage, what did you think the glass story was really about? Well, you make a couple big decisions early on. Who's going to be your lead, right?

Who's the protagonist of your movie? And I decided to try something that I had never tried before, which was to have one protagonist for the first half of the movie and then another protagonist for the second half of the movie. I wouldn't recommend it. It's a pretty slick trick, but glass is the hero for the first half of the movie, and then Chuck Lane becomes the hero for the second half. So once I knew that the movie had that sort of dual protagonist structure, it became very clear to me that emotionally what the movie had to be about was what happens when the least popular kid in high school has to take down the most popular kid in high school. And that's the emotional heartbeat of that movie all the way through. And that pulls it, too, a little bit out of journalism. If there's somebody in the audience who doesn't care about the niceties of magazine writing,

they understand. They understand the high school. Yes. Or a high school, there are really popular people and there are awkward, less popular people. That's right. And that every day is this kind of push and pull between them. That's right. And most importantly, Peter Sarsgaard and Hayden Christensen understood that.

As you're doing research, what did your sources tell you it was like to work at the New Republic in the 90s. Well, the movie sort of speaks to that. It was that feeling of very young people empowered with tremendous responsibility. It really at that point was the in-flight magazine of Air Force One. And the average age was 26, or the median age, was 26 of the writers that were working there. It was low pay, incredible experience and you took a certain level of pride in how hard the job was. It was a place for grinders. And among that group, Glass was known to be the toughest grinder. He was the one who was toughest on other people's articles, the one who was most meticulous about getting facts right.

And that's what you were respected for there. It wasn't a place that was about fly It was about the work. And here comes this guy who does the work, seemingly better than anyone else, and is bringing a flash that no one else had. So he really stood out. What did they tell you about those weekly staff meetings where we see Glass performing in the movie? Rockstar. That he would do exactly what he does in the movie, that he would pitch something that blew everybody out of the room. And then he would say, that's stupid.

I know. I'll probably kill it. And it was this weird sort of self-inoculation that he would do to protect himself from anyone not liking an idea and to make sure that he always looked as humble as possible. And for everyone at the magazine, not just glass. That was your proving ground. That is where you talked about your piece. Sure. Performed in front of your colleagues in front of your bosses?

Yes, except no one performed except Glass. Right? Most people did it the way that Chuck Lane does it, which is, oh, yeah, I'm writing this piece about Gabriel Garcia. Marquez. Going down to Haiti. Yeah. And that's how they knew how to do it. But they were competing with someone who just couldn't be competed with.

I mean, he was just too good. One challenge about writing movies about journalism is that sitting down and writing an article, even a wildly fictitious, interesting article like glasses is not a very cinematic act. Right. How do you get around that when you're writing the screenplay? Go inside his head and show what he's writing about. that's how you do it just make them scenes and and so that's what we did we just put him in in all those scenes that he had written about and and when I actually did meet him two years

after the movie was released was released first question I asked him was did we get it right and did we did I picture those articles the way you pictured them and he said he said I did that's fascinating but I'll tell you something about that night as I said I had tried really hard to get to him uh when I was making the movie and then after the movie was released I was told that the New York Times had screened it for him and that he had stared at his shoe tops for 90% of the movie then he moved out to L.A., which is where I live and I found out he was actually working four blocks from my house, which was kind of stunning. And I went to a party one night and Stephen Glass walked in.

And he didn't know me by face. So the host of the party introduced us as Stephen and Billy. And we were chatting for a second. I said, Stephen, do you have a minute? Because I think you and I should probably sit down and talk. He said, why? I said, because I'm that Billy. And his eyes went wide. And we moved off to another room.

We talked for about a half hour. And I said to him, I just want you to know, I didn't make this movie to cause you pain. I know that it did. And that's a very unhappy side effect for me. That was not my goal at all. And I wanted to apologize for something. that I had said after the movie was released, I had said something about him in the press that was pretty snarky,

and I had hoped he had never heard it, but of course he had. And I wanted to apologize for that. And then I wanted to ask him, do you think I got it right? And we started that conversation. And he had mentioned something about wanting to be a screenwriter, and I offered to help him in any way that I could. And that offer still stands. And he and I actually wound up becoming kind of friends.

We did a Q&A of the film together once. which was pretty amazing. He came to some political events that I threw. He lost his wife tragically to early onset Alzheimer's, and I was at the funeral. It's weird to say I consider him a friend, but if he needed me, I would be there for him. You feel, he said he got, you felt you got the movie right. What do you think of the film in totality? Was he able to have an opinion about it?

a movie that is about him? I don't think so. And it would be a lot to ask. Yeah. Here's the question I want to know. So you have a character, Chuck Lane in the movie. There is a real Chuck Lane. Yes.

Forming the movie. Do you need to buy the life rights to Chuck Lane in order to have a character in your movie that is named him and did the things he did in real life? No, you really don't if you're not going to defame him in any way. Okay. I'm sure we had some sort of arrangement with Chuck, because I wanted him to be compensated and because he was incredibly helpful.

But no, I wouldn't have needed that necessarily. Because I was interested. There are some characters in the movie who have their real names. And then there are some characters like Hana Rosen, the Republic Staffer. She has transformed, at least partly, into Caitlin. Yes.

Jonathan Chait, now this big columnist in New York Magazine becomes a woman named Amy in the movie. Yes. And the decision to do that was what? It was just easier to complete. a couple characters because Caitlin was a bunch of people and Amy was a bunch of people. And that enabled me to cast those two brilliant actresses, Chloe Sevenny, who is, oh my God, she's so great in the movie.

And Melanie Linsky, who's a dear friend. And I mean, they're just both brilliant in the movie. And crafting those characters in that way enabled me to cast those two. what was Chloe 70's interest in this part? Because in 2003, she is the queen of cool indie movies. Yes. Kids, last days of disco, American Psycho, Boys Don't Cry. Right.

What did she see in this character? You'd have to ask her. I never actually asked her what drew you to this. Something about it spoke to her. Maybe she wanted to do something that felt like it wasn't. so indie because I don't feel like our movie feels like an indie. Maybe she wanted to stretch a little bit. I don't know.

Maybe she's just like the script or just like the character. It's hard to know. I was surprised to learn how much of your screenplay was taken from real conversations. Yes. We have to do that. If you're going to do this movie, yes, you have to do it that way. And you got transcripts of the calls between Lane and Glass and the Forbes reporter and editor who smoked him out from Buzz Bissinger.

Did I get them from Buzz or did I get them? from Camby's farrar. It's 20 years ago, so I don't actually remember, but I got them from somewhere. And so there's dialogue that actually took place on those phone calls, that they were both recording. And you took that and just plopped that right into the screen. Having done enough of these true stories, I can tell you, the dialogue I can make up is never going to be as good as the dialogue the people actually said. Ever, ever. There's something about the way people really talk that is idiosyncratic and very compelling.

and you're crazy if you try to top it. Another detail I was amazed at when we see Michael Kelly's new Republic office in the movie, the pictures that are behind him. Yes. Are pictures from Kelly's coverage of the first Iraq War. Right. Again, I'm the biggest journalism nerd in the world. I would never have noticed that.

Why did you do that in the movie? It makes a difference to the actors. You know, Picasso said art is a lie that tells us the truth. right um if you don't have to lie why do it why not put the real pictures on the wall why not have the real newspapers on the on the couch um it makes the actress feel grounded in that way makes me feel grounded in that way no one wants to walk around thinking they're doing something fraudulent um so tell the truth the whole movies about that everything that we could get right we were going to get right Real newspapers, meaning real newspapers from 1998?

No. What kind of level of truth were we seeking here? No, meaning if they were really readers of the Wall Street Journal, I was going to have Wall Street journals sitting on that couch. As you know, there's something in journalism called a write-around where your subject is not available, so you wind up talking to everybody in the subject's life. And the theory is sometimes you get a more vivid picture. Yes.

By doing that. Because you had to work so hard to get to this person you couldn't talk to. Sure. Did that happen, do you think, with the screenplay? I'm sure that it happened with that. Part of what you're trying to capture is this idea that we are what we do, right? It's our behavior that defines us. Stephen Glass's behavior defined him. The choices that he made defined him.

I was trying to capture what those choices were, what went into those choices. I was able to get that from the facts of what he had actually. done. What the people around me, around him gave me was a sense of how many different facets there were to his personality and how he showed everybody around him a different side than someone else was getting, which was extremely revealing about who he was as a person. How did you attack the question of why did he do this? I asked myself why I would do it. I always felt a very deep connection to Stephen Glass and a very deep understanding of who he was. And part of the reason why the movie spoke to me was because I always felt I was half Stephen Glass and half chuckling.

And I understood the pressure Stephen Glass grew up in. I don't think there's a very big difference between Highland Park, Illinois and Encino, California. So what's your feeling there is a sense pressure to perform from his parents? pressure to perform less specifically in my case from my parents than just from the culture that I emerged from you know when you grow up in that kind of suburb it's not a question of are you going to go to college it's where are you going to go to college and it's not a question of are you going to succeed it's how are you going to succeed and and there's just there's no option beyond that. And part of that is a Jewish thing, I'm sure, a sense of education and success

being the only means of survival for that particular part of our culture. But it's just never an option not to think that way when you grow up in that kind of environment. And I certainly understood the pressure that he grew up under. And I understood the peer pressure that was around him. understood the pressure he applied to himself. Those were all things that were very real for me and still are. Growing up in that environment, working in that environment, and then feeling inside like, I don't know if I can live up to the expectations. For sure. That's right. I mean, that's, it's a lot of pressure. And it can make you make bad choices. He did. But I don't judge him for it. Peter Sarsgaard said something interesting back in 2003. He said, the story of

Glass is not so much, why did he lie? Why did he make up all these stories? But why did we believe him you agree with that i think from peter's perspective that's what the movie's about um so that's the question chuck lane is asking that's chuck lane's question how did i publish all these stories before i finally smoked him out that is that is his arc in the movie why why was i a part of this why didn't i see it sooner um and that's thrilling that that was what peter took away from it because i don't want him stepping outside the movie as if he could view it objectively you want him experiencing it as his character would experience it. Yeah, I think that's part of it. I mean, it's part of an examination of the culture that made it possible and why his pitches were so successful

and why people didn't want to look any deeper than they looked. And what's your theory for that question? I think it's a term I learned later, but confirmation bias is a pretty powerful thing. If you think about, what was he writing about? He was writing in 1990. that the CPAC conference was filled with young white male mean Republicans with no concern for democracy or the rights of others who were just vicious and wanted to embarrass a female. Okay, he was right. That's what CPAC is. He was prescient in that way. But in 1998, when he was writing it, we didn't know that for sure. We just wanted it to be true. So he wrote something that met with our bias perfectly and confirmed it. Why would we dig deeper? Why would the

people in the room say, this seems weird to me? They'd say, oh my God, of course this is happening. And of course Stephen Glass is the one that found it. Right? And if he's going to write about a convention of people that are selling stuff about Monica Lewinsky and making fun of Bill Clinton, again, that's something that you think, yeah, I want that to be true. That sounds like a funny way to examine a national angst. Why would you look any deeper? Unless, of course, you're a journalist, in which case it's your job to look deeper. But he made that difficult because he was being so tough on their articles that they thought, well, that guy would never cheat. That guy's killing me for cheating. And this goes to Glass's understanding of

what readers want, but more importantly, what his editors want. For sure. And what his colleagues want. Hmm. I can serve them. Serve them exactly what they are looking for. I'm going to serve them what they're looking for. And at the same time, I'm going to crush them on their articles because they got a letter

wrong. And it would never occur to them that I would ever get anything wrong. Hayden Christensen was 22 when Shattered Glass came out. He had just filmed two Star Wars prequels, one of which had come out. Yes. What got him interested in playing Glass? A producer named Mark Gordon, for whom I will always have a debt. I had asked Mark if he would finance the movie.

And he said no. But then completely coincidentally, he had a meeting with Hayden Christensen, just a general. And he said, what kind of stuff are you looking to do? And Hayden said, I'm really interested in this guy, Stephen Glass. Do you know who he is? and Mark Gordon said, well, you should read this script. It's already been written by this guy named Billy Ray. And Hayden read the script and said he was in.

That's how it happened. He was just interested in glass generally. Yep. And no idea that you'd written screenplay. No idea. That's amazing. Yep. Did you have a piece of paper with other names on it if Christensen had not turned out to be the actor?

No. Because that was the thing that got the movie made. So there was never a list. for me. You said in a commentary track, it took about five days for Christensen to get in the groove of the Glass character. What about the character was he trying to unlock? Well, we had a fundamental disagreement about who that character was. Hayden felt that because Glass was lying, that he should sound like he's lying. So Hayden wanted to play it kind of whiny and nasal. And I felt very strongly, no, no, no, he's telling the truth.

You got to lower the timbre your voice. So we would do eight takes his way and one take my way and we would move on. And had I been a stronger director, I could have cut that ratio down, I think, significantly. But it took a while for him to actually groove into the character. And so five days in, I came up to him once he was sort of comfortable in it. I came up to him and I said, okay, Hayden, attack of the clones. what happened? And he said there are moments in that movie where we had to re-loop the dialogue because on the

soundtrack you could hear the sound of George Lucas turning the page of his newspaper. He just didn't get a lot of help on that movie. But I was there to give him all the help he needed. That's interesting because that character can sound whiny in attack of the clones. So maybe some of that whininess was transferring from one movie. to the other. Yes, but it was not appropriate for hours. So you thought he should glass, the character of Glass, should be lying in this? In the most truthful way possible. Yeah, I'm not going to have the actor give away the joke of the movie. No way. That's bad storytelling.

You have to be seduced, right? Like those high school kids are, like everybody in the conference room is. What did you think of Hank Azaria, who we knew from the Simpsons and other roles to play new Republican editor Mike Kelly. I had a sense that Hank would kill that part and would really thirst for it. And that proved to be true. Hank was dying to play something like that. And it was so unlike anything he had done before. Man, did he kill it?

Filming is 28 days in Montreal? 28 days, yes. And why Montreal? It's cheaper. Everything about that had to do with money. and we felt that there were exteriors in Montreal that could double for suburban D.C. And you did do some shooting in D.C.? We did.

We wound up getting a couple days in D.C. And this was after the principal 28 days. And in fact, if you remember the D.C. sniper, what was the name, Boyd Malvo? Do I have that right? Lee Boyd-Malvo. Remembering correctly. Okay. The day that that was happening.

was the day that we were out stealing exteriors for our credit sequence. The credit sequence is just a bunch of random shots of D.C. We were driving around in a white van with no permit. And I would just say, pull over, shoot this. And we would pull over and shoot this. And then we went out towards where Malvo was that first day, which was Georgetown or Bethesda. It was somewhere around there.

And we started hearing about this guy. driving around in a white fan shooting people and i said okay we're shutting this down and my producer said no we're not we have to get more footage and we did we just kept shooting you'd written movies before this but you never directed one right so what did you find you had to learn about that process everything everything i knew nothing i i was not one of those writers who was desperate to become a director um i thought that writers who complain about wanting to be a director are annoying um they were then they still are. But it was time for me to find out if I was growing up enough to do this job.

So I picked shattered glass because it had no gunplay, no car chases, nothing blew up, no nudity. None of those craft-driven things that I knew I had no idea how to shoot. This was just, can you capture tone and can you capture performance? So I did the equivalent of journalism. I started taking producers to lunch and saying, okay, you've worked with first-time directors, where are the landmines and taking notes. And I took a bunch of first time directors to lunch. I took Ed Matheson to lunch and, I'm sorry, at Solomon to lunch and Brian Helgeland and David

Goyer. These are all people who had just made movies for the first time. And I said, what was your experience? Like, take me through. Where am I going to get into trouble? And I took other directors to lunch. talked about their first experiences. And with each, and some of those were cold calls, people that just didn't know, but they were all willing to do it.

And with each, at the end of every lunch, I would say, okay, what do you know about me that would concern you as a first-time director? And, you know, you hope they'll say, nothing, you're going to be great. But one of them said to me, you belabor the point. And I said, as a person or as a writer, and he said both. I said, okay, thank you. That's good feedback, by the way. It's excellent feedback and accurate feedback, and I needed it.

And then from some I got very, very practical advice. Like, I remember I took the producer Lawrence Bender to lunch and asked him about first-time directors, and he gave me great advice. He said, use your auditions as directing practice. That's how you learn how to craft a performance. That was brilliant. advice. How'd the screenplay hold up when you started filming? Really well. Really well. And that was thrilling too. It was pretty tight because when you only have 28 days to shoot, it doesn't even

occur to you to put something in the script that's unnecessary. So very, very few things fell out of it when we actually got to the cut. What didn't work? Well, the initial framing device was not Stephen Glass speaking to high school students. The initial framing device, was the aftermath of the D.C. Correspondence Dinner, everybody who had worked at the New Republic sitting around a big table, director dressed to camera, and they were each the narrator of the story.

This is the correspondent dinner you had attended. Well, it was the equivalent of. It was all my actors sitting around, you know, in a fake ballroom, and we shot it and cut the movie together with it. And it was my framing device. It was how we narrated the movie. And the studio hated it, hated. the framing device and wanted me to take it out.

And I didn't think the movie could succeed without a framing device because I needed it just narratively. So I called a meeting with the heads of Lionsgate who had just paid for the movie. And I went in and pitched like Stephen Glass on his best day. I said, here's what movie is. Here's what the movie needs. Here's my plan. Here's how to do it.

Here are the script pages. here's why I think it'll be better. And they could have told me to go jump in a lake. They already spent millions of dollars on the movie, but they let me go do it. And it made the movie so much better. You didn't add as glass did in the movie, show me the money.

No, I did not. Some trivia, Billy, before we talked about the movie's release. On the commentary track, you said the MPAA initially gave the movie an R rating. Yes. I find that unbelievable. Did I miss some nudity or something in the movie that would occasion an R rating? No. So when the movie was written, it was agreed that it was going to be an R-rated movie.

That's what Lionsgate was sending me off to do. So in the screenplay, there were, I think, 13 uses of the word fuck and one use of the word prick. By the time we had put the movie in front of the MPAA, it was four and one. And the rule of the MPA is if you have two, fucks, you're out. That's it, automatic R. So we showed it to them and they said R. And the lady who made the decision her name was, I believe Joan Graves, I think I have that name right.

She was the head of the MPA, lovely woman. And these people just sit in a room in New York and watch movies and give them grades based on violence, nudity, and language. So we cut another F bomb out. showed it to her again and she said no and we cut another one out i showed it to her again she said i'm sorry no and i begged and begged and begged and then she famously sighed and said okay you can have two fuchs in a prick and so we became the first movie ever to have two fuchs in it uh to get a pg rating that's amazing it was amazing tom cruise and his former agent paula wagner were listed as executive

producers on this movie? Yes. What was their involvement with Shattered Glass? Cruz Wagner, they were in existence at the time. I was writing something else for them. The executive at HBO who had hired me, her name was Gay Hirsch, she went over to Cruz Wagner. So she had a fondness for the script. I asked Cruz Wagner to step in and help me get it out of HBO. And not surprisingly, HBO doesn't mind pissing off me, but didn't want to piss off Tom Cruise. So when Cruz Ragnar said, we'd like to take this back, HBO said, okay. And that's how we were able to get it out of HBO and make it as a feature somewhere else. Two very interesting things happened in the months before this movie was released in 2003. In the spring,

Jason Blair, it discovered to have deceived his editors at the New York Times. Yes. And you thought what when you saw that story? Well, I thought it's catching, right? You know, courage is contagious, but so is fraud. And I think this happens a lot in American journalism. I thought Jason Blair was a particularly repugnant version of it because he was so unrepentant. Glass at least knew that he had done something awful and really did try to apologize for. it. I was I was not a fan of the way Jason Blair handled that. Happens a lot in the sense of mass fraud or fudging little things around the corner. I think fudging little things and if you don't get caught, you start fudging bigger things. Also in 2003, the real Stephen Glass who had virtually disappeared. Yes. From public life after his downfall, writes a novel. Yes. Goes on 60 minutes. Yes.

Starts making these public appearances. Right. Do you think that was in reaction to your your movie coming out? Hard to know, and I've never asked him. So I wouldn't want to hazard a guess about it. But it's what I would do. Movies released on October 31st, 2003. Yes. Eight theaters. Yes. It's the same week as the human stain came out. Is that right? That's right. Do you remember what the number one movie in America that weekend was? No. Scary movie three. There's a trivia question. That's a good trivia question. Would you make of the reviews of Shattered Glass? Well, they were pretty thrilling. This is when Rotten Tomatoes was first happening. And there was one point, I was checking and there was one point, we were like 99 out of 104. We were really crushing it out there.

And of course, I was focused on who are those five shitty reviews I got? And there's one guy from the San Jose B who didn't like the movie and then didn't like breach. Like, whatever due to that guy, I don't know. But, you know, you do pay attention to stuff like that. As Stephen Glass, would. I always thought that was a dumb release date. Why would you release that movie on Halloween? The one night when you know parents can't go see it. But that wasn't my call. You also got good reviews from good critics. Yes. Roger Ebert. Yes. Tony Scott at the New York Times. Yes. Wesley Morris then at the Boston Globe. Yep. So that had to be a big thrill too. What was your blue sky box office for this movie. Oh my God. You always want people who bet on you to make their money. And I didn't have a

number in my head. Whatever it was, we didn't get there. But the fact that we're still talking about it, 20 years later, that to me is a much more important mark of success. Its cultural footprint is bigger than it's box office. For sure. And I've never met a journalist ever who doesn't know that movie and and I get told all the time about people who got through journalism school and were shown the movie in journalism school. That happens constantly. The test is you go to a journalist and say the name jukechronic. Yes. Jukechromich. They will know that it is from shattered glass. Fantastic. So you mentioned the Richard Jewell movie you wrote that Clint Eastwood directed. You have come back to the topic of journalism in that. In state of play, which you're one of the

writers on where Russell Crowe plays a Washington journalist. Why return to that topic? Well, when I was growing up, Woodward and Bernstein were heroes in my house. That idea of journalists playing a really vital role in the protection of American democracy, that was real to me. It's more real now than it's ever been. It's never been under greater assault. And I think I always had a sense that that was coming and that we had to be talking a lot about why journalism matters, why good journalism matters. Now, what's happened out there where we now, instead of getting informed by news, we choose the news that already agrees with us. The dangers of that, I think, have become pretty apparent to everybody. You once said I made this

movie for Woodward and Bernstein. That's for sure. And Woodward saw it, which was pretty thrilling, and thought I got it right. What was his review? He wrote me an email saying, you got it right and in some ways uncannily right. You know, get that from Woodward. That's like being told by Babe Ruth, you got a good swing. Did other journalists respond to the movie directly to you? Many, many.

And as I said, it still happens. What's so interesting when you say talking about the value of good journalism? This movie certainly does that. Yes. In Adam Penningberg at Forbes and then Chuck Lane after a time. at the New Republic, but it also presents this curveball of here is not only bad journalism, but what people who are suspicious of the media think all journalists are doing. How do you reconcile those two things?

That they're all part of the human spectrum of what's possible in terms of our behavior. If you give, you know, part of the reason why the Russian Army is having so much trouble in Ukraine is because it's not built on a system of trust. There are only a couple generals that can make decisions, and the people who are actually fighting on the ground don't have any decision-making capability, and that's why it's so hard for them to fight that fight. Whereas when American units go into battle,

there's a lot of responsibility placed, you know, at the sergeant level, at the corporal level. They have autonomy, and so they're able to be a little bit more nimble. Well, that's how journalism worked at the New Republic. They gave a lot of responsibility. to young people, they can make mistakes. You know, in the same way that the Comey rule or breach or Richard Jewel or any of the other things that I've worked on, it's this idea that the New Republic is not an institution.

We think of it that way, but it's not an institution. It's a group of people who are stewards of an institution. And those people can have good judgment or bad judgment. They can make good decisions or bad decisions. The U.S. Post Office is a very different place under Lewis to Joy than it is when it's run by someone who believes people should actually get their mail, right? The Department of Justice is a very different place under Bill Barr than it is when it's run by someone who actually believes injustice. And it's not the buildings that make the decisions. It's the people in them.

And it's something that I've never wanted to stop writing about because it's so fundamental to the American experience. We place trust in these institutions. We're actually placing trust in the people that are inside them. And someone's got to be examining the behavior of those people. Billy Ray, thanks for coming on the press box. It's a privilege and it's flattering to be asked. Thank you so much. That's the press box.

I'm Brian Curtis, production magic. As always, by Erica Servantis. We've got more fun stuff coming up on Pressbox summer vacation. Watch this space next Monday. And until then, have a fantastic week. I'll talk to you soon.