'Richard Jewell': The true story of an ordinary security guard who made an extraordinary discovery
Clint Eastwood's film 'Richard Jewell' is poised between infamy and greatness. It had an early Oscar buzz going for it and Kathy Bates (who plays Jewell's mother, Barbara “Bobi” Jewell) in the film has secured a Golden Globe nomination.
But it has also drawn the ire of the media establishment for its depiction of the late Kathy Scruggs, the 'Atlanta Journal-Constitution' reporter, who first broke the story about Richard Jewell being investigated by the FBI. The film's primary motive, of course, is to celebrate the "ordinary" security guard Richard Jewell (played by Paul Walter Hauser), the unlikely hero who saved thousands of lives when he spotted the backpack with the pipe bomb at the Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.
Three days later, Scruggs' story led to a trial-by-media as he was dragged into a flawed FBI investigation, which identified Jewell as a prime suspect for the fitting the 'lone bomber' profile. His weight, the fact that he lived with his mother and his excessive adulation of law enforcement made him a prime suspect.
The film is based on the 1997 Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner and the 2019 'The Suspect', book by former U.S. Attorney Kent Alexander, who was involved in the investigation, and former 'Wall Street Journal' editor Kevin Salwen, who was involved in WSJ's coverage of the attack. However, the film does take liberties in creating movie-friendly villain archetypes to off-set Jewell's heroics in its depiction of the FBI and Kathy Scruggs. So how much of the film's story is true-to-life?
Richard Jewell was an AT&T security guard who was at the right place at the right time. 'The Suspect' and the Brenner article depicts Jewell as a well-meaning, man-child (just like the movie). He was also, by all accounts obsessed with law enforcement, owning many firearms and he had got a bad rap with his former employers for his taking his job a little too seriously and indulging in heavy-handed behavior as a campus police officer.
Jewell was patrolling the Centennial Olympic Park where thousands had gathered for a late concert during the Summer Olympics on July 27, 1996. Sometime after midnight, Eric Robert Rudolph, a terrorist who would later bomb a lesbian nightclub and two abortion clinics, planted a green backpack containing a fragmentation-laden pipe bomb underneath a bench.
Jewell, who made it a point to stick to the protocol of checking the venue, discovered the suspicious bag and immediately alerted the Georgia Bureau of Investigation officers. Jewell's discovery came nine minutes before Rudolph himself called 911 to deliver the bomb threat. Jewell and other security personnel began clearing the immediate area so that a bomb squad could investigate the suspicious package. The bomb exploded 13 minutes later, killing Alice Hawthorne and injuring over one hundred others.
Just after the event, Jewell was hailed as a hero for his alertness and discovery of the backpack. But three days later, Jewell's hometown paper the 'Atlanta Journal-Constitution' reported that Jewell, the "hero" of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, was a suspect in the FBI investigation and might have planted the bomb only to "find" it later so that he could play the hero. The report was the beginning of a nightmare for Jewell as reporters started turning up in droves to question him about his involvement in the bombing.
The FBI agent Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm) is a composite character and his actions are based on the real-life investigation tactics the FBI used on Jewell like the training video stunt and trying to get him to waive his rights. The FBI had zeroed on to Jewell as a suspect because of a similar case in the 1984 Summer Olympics where an LAPD officer hailed for defusing a bomb was later revealed to have built the bomb himself. FBI's flawed profiling techniques zeroed in on Jewell as a suspect.
Jewell's lawyer, Watson Bryant, and mother, Bobi Jewell are pretty true to life. Only Bryant wasn't Jewell's only lawyer. Jewell had a whole team of lawyers who worked together to rescue him. The only one who has been unjustly portrayed and, some would say, defamed is Kathy Scruggs. In the movie, Scruggs is shown sleeping with Shaw to get the information about Jewell being a suspect and she is shown to be an obnoxious reporter with no ethics. However, colleagues and friends have spoken up, defending Scruggs, who they say was just doing her job and her scoop was true. The media trial that followed was not Scruggs fault but in the movie, she is made the villain of the piece.
This is evidently a passion project for Clint Eastwood who refused to evacuate Warner Brothers Studio even when a wildfire was creeping closer to the studio lot so he could finish editing 'Richard Jewell'. But we wonder if his sexist take on Scruggs will take attention away from the hero Richard Jewell again.
'Richard Jewell' is scheduled to be theatrically released on December 13 by Warner Brothers Pictures.
