《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》由美国导演克林特.伊斯特伍德所执导,上映于2019年的改编电影。本片原型取自于1996年亚特兰大奥运爆炸案中发现炸弹装置的保安,他一直梦想着成为执法者。在这次事件中他先是被嘉奖为梦寐以求的角色:人民的英雄,而后却被媒体诬陷为炸弹凶手的事件。而在不断恶化的社会舆论中,他意识到自己所面对的不仅是公众的质疑,更是媒体和执法机构的联合阻力。在这样重重
《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》由美国导演克林特.伊斯特伍德所执导,上映于2019年的改编电影。本片原型取自于1996年亚特兰大奥运爆炸案中发现炸弹装置的保安,他一直梦想着成为执法者。在这次事件中他先是被嘉奖为梦寐以求的角色:人民的英雄,而后却被媒体诬陷为炸弹凶手的事件。而在不断恶化的社会舆论中,他意识到自己所面对的不仅是公众的质疑,更是媒体和执法机构的联合阻力。在这样重重困境中,他该如何破局?
本片开头即精准地刻画了一位在保守州成长的右翼白人男性。从主角在一所学校中当保安,对学生进行训斥:告诫他们要遵守校园规定并对之保持敬意;到后来镜头一转,描绘了主角在南方广袤的靶场里练枪。再到此后因为学生的投诉,校长把他叫到办公室批评说:现在的学生非常懂得维护自己的权益,你还是尽量不要惹是生非。他答曰:我只知道应该遵守法律,遵守规则。我们不应该挑衅它。从这时刻即已经预示了后面的剧情的发展---这是一个哪怕受到执法机构不公正对待的,也会遵守其规定且对其保持敬意的秩序驯化者。
正是因为处于对秩序和规则的尊敬,才让理查德对于法律的执行者---警察,FBI保持憧憬。然而,由于自身的体型以及能力问题,他并没有成功成为执法者。在被学校解雇后,成为了亚特兰大奥运会的保安。而整个奥运爆炸案的实质性内容在本片并不是重点。在理查德发现炸弹后,他迅速被群众拥趸。在一场媒体疯狂寻找热点进而促进销量的体育赛事中,真正的体育竞技反而显得无足轻重。媒体要的只是热点,而不是实质性体育技巧的讨论。所以炸弹案一出,理查德迅速的登上了各大媒体的头版头条。此刻,风光无限,他终于成为了梦寐以求的人民英雄---“维护了秩序”。理查德母亲热泪盈眶地说道:我亲爱的理查德,我真为你骄傲,我一直知道你能成功。
此后警方的调查却陷入了困境,在全国所有媒体的聚焦下,凶手却一直无法归案。在不断的压力下,一名FBI探员肖恩开始对理查德起疑:是否整个爆炸案事件是他自己自导自演? 警方转而对这位“人民英雄”展开调查。随着调查的深入,警方发现理查德的嫌疑越来越大:这是一位成年已久仍和母亲一起居住的男性---他可能有心理问题;他小时候为了炸鼹鼠制作过土制炸弹;理查德好几年没缴税了;理查德曾经假扮警察被逮捕;在学校当保安时经常被投诉;家里有手榴弹,哪怕它是空心的;他甚至保留了公园里的椅子碎片作为纪念。种种迹象显示理查德有可能就是凶手。
此后的剧情发展才真正开始进入本片的主线。亚特兰大宪章报的女记者凯西为了抢先在别的媒体前面获得独家信息,决定向FBI探员肖恩套话。通过情色手段,肖恩把他们现在的调查进度告诉了女记者,并嘱咐她不要对公众公布。可第二天亚特兰大宪章报的头版却是:英雄还是罪犯,爆炸案是理查德自导自演的?此时,全国舆论哗然。一夜之间,理查德从人民英雄变为众矢之的。无数媒体将他家门口围得水泄不通---他们等待着FBI什么时候对理查德进行传讯,理查德什么时候会“自曝”。而从未见过这种场面的“红脖”理查德顿时无法招架,只得打电话给曾经给他发广告的律师。律师赶紧前往理查德家中,和他对接下的行动进行法律的准备,教他如何应对FBI的问话。
此后,FBI对理查德的“传讯”开始。这其实并不是传讯,在实行普通法的美国,法治的重要基石之一即为无罪推定,只有在有决定性证据证明一个自然人是罪犯的情况下,才能对其进行逮捕。而以肖恩为代表的FBI以诱导的方式,利用理查德对于执法者的崇拜,在假装对理查德进行一般问话时,支开他的律师,诱导他说出“我(理查德),是放置炸弹的人“,并对其秘密录音。此后,利用这个“决定性证据”,对其发出逮捕令。而此时,FBI对他家进行的无意义的地毯式搜索---拿走理查德母亲的睡衣裤与私人用品,只是为了搜出真正的决定性证据。(因为他们自己心中知道自己的证据是假的,这是彻头彻尾的违法取证!完全违反程序正义)而在这番令人受尽屈辱的对待中,理查德竟然极力配合,理由是肖恩探员对他说:你也知道我们执法者的苦衷,理查德回答说:是的,FBI的命令我是一定会遵守的。他的律师对FBI这样的行为十分愤怒,对肖恩大吼到:你们可以对他进行调查,但是不可以侵犯他家庭的尊严!而对于理查德本身,律师更是问道:你为什么不生气?理查德答道:我只是一个法律的遵守者。
此后理查德被羁押,等待司法系统的正式起诉,而他的律师和律师助理想尽办法证明他是无罪的,而女记者凯西此时良心发现,计算了具体爆炸案的距离和时间,发现理查德根本不可能有机会作案。而理查德的母亲此时在律师的帮助下,召开了新闻发布会,声泪俱下地控诉媒体的偏向报道,不实地指控自己的儿子。令人动容。而律师利用自己收集的证据和新闻发布会推翻了FBI的检控,最终理查德被无罪释放。最后,在联邦调查局办公室里,肖恩对理查德说:“我知道是你干的,我一定会找到证据证明你是罪犯。”而在这场风波的末尾,理查德终于进行了绝地反击---在经历了系统性的不公正对待后,他说道:我确实不是罪犯,如果你找到证据证明我当然不会反抗,前提是,真的证据。
这部影片在当下的美国语境中所敲响的警钟是振聋发聩的,但却遭到了社会舆论的冷遇。单从所获得的奖项与评价就看的出来:烂番茄媒体评价73%,各大颁奖典礼也完全没有水花,美国把控着文化传播的左翼精英很明显地拒绝了这部电影。这部电影更是被部分媒体攻击:片中所刻画的女记者凯西表现了导演本人“鲜明”的厌女立场,从而引发了媒体对于片中所触犯的性别政治雷区进行口诛笔伐。
抛开记者的性别不谈,单是从记者是否有权力通过其他不法手段获取信息来进行报道谈起。奉行三权分立的美国,身为第四权的新闻权理应对司法,行政,立法进行制衡。而片中所表现的非但不是新闻权对于司法权的制衡,反而是和司法权进行媾和,进而对于一个他们自己所不喜的普通右翼男性进行绞杀。这是典型的精英话语权对于普通群众的压制。媒体对于销量和点击量近乎病态的追逐,代表着他们完全对于自己职业操守和做人良心的嗤之以鼻。而司法系统对于达成自己目的而完全不顾程序正义的行为,更是将美国宪法的基石视如粪土。
而在此时此刻的美国,这样一部影片更是警钟长鸣。深挖这些所谓的主流媒体背后的财团:CNN,纽约时报,华盛顿邮报,MSBCN,NPR,Newsweek,大西洋月刊…会意识到媒体不过是左翼政治集团的打手和傀儡,只是为了自己的得势而进行的政治宣传。而为达到目的无所不用其极:对右翼政治人物进行捏造攻击,诬陷。2020年美国大选期间,华盛顿邮报(Washington Post)试图再现第二次水门事件,针对特朗普关于佐治亚州的投票问题录音进行编辑,想要描绘出一个试图作假改变选票的候选人形象。对于特朗普本人更是直接写出一片特稿来对其进行许多不实的攻击,而在短短的一个月后,华盛顿邮报自己又悄无声息的刊登了一篇道歉文章:针对此前的一篇稿件针对特朗普先生的不实指控,以及“不小心”对录音文件进行编辑对民众进行了误导宣传表示歉意。而华盛顿邮报这样的道歉行为实际上算十分罕见,更多的主流媒体,例如CNN,在BLM期间,对非裔美国人的犯罪行为,通过图片编辑将其肤色调亮成为白人;或是纽约时报明显采用的错误的数据误导读者;在此后却继续装聋作哑,假装无事发生。
对于群体陷入狂热,美国的右翼如同片中的理查德一样,是秩序的遵守者,即使这个系统秩序有一定争议。当在媒体的煽动下,被迫卷进事件的主角,选择了法律的武器自证清白。这是在系统内捍卫正义。群体的狂热,激动是可以被理解的,因为绝大多数人没有选择权,是美国宣传机器下的产物。但不管愤怒的群体也好,理性的个体也好,都是生活在系统下。我们应该诉诸系统下的正当手段,这样才有助于一个良性的系统持续运转。一个良性的系统是有自我纠正能力的,他可以进行新陈代谢,通过立法的手段来割掉癌变部位。而通过激进左翼的街头手段,冲击的不仅是系统的病灶,更是将整个系统置于动荡之中。而一旦良性的系统失灵,社会就会陷入不稳中,犯罪率会激升,而此时的左翼却根本没有能力对于这个失控的社会进行管制,左翼的本质其实就是只有破坏,从不治理。对于一个满目疮痍的社会系统来说,这样做或许是最好的选择,而对于一个运转尚可的系统来讲,这样做只会给社会带来负面效应,进而导致众生的陨落,至于激进左翼背后的精英集团对摇摇欲坠的社会却毫不在意---激进集团只是他们夺权的手段。
而在当今的美国,由于左翼媒体占据舆论高地,天然地对于话语权进行垄断。而越来越式微的右翼逐渐被隐形,2016年特朗普的上台左翼媒体被“惊吓”,高呼民粹主义的回归,美国右转。而右转真正是从16年才开始的吗?右翼被隐形了太久,没有媒体,没有大学教授,没有跨国公司,没有好莱坞……这是左翼精英长年累月对于这个右翼群体的刻意忽视,视而不见所造成的。这部影片的主旨当然不是想还原当时爆炸案的完整细节,而是导演本人对于当下美国左翼的栽赃陷害进行反击:急速左转的好莱坞将政治正确奉为圭臬,打着人人都可以做自己的口号,在文化上越来越“多彩”的左倾主义宣传下,实际上是立场越发单一的政治审查。
一部探讨媒体,司法,和个人关系的影片,看完之后给我最大的感受就是愤怒和难过,社会舆论创造英雄和毁灭英雄的门槛太低了让我愤怒,无良媒体为了流量把未经证实的情况放在头版头条,口口声声说自己只是在报道事实令人啼笑皆非,恶心(让子弹飞);一个充满正义感的人被无端质疑让我难过,电影后段的一个情节,联邦调查组询问理查德“为什么炸弹爆炸时你刚好在安全的地方?”这句话既可
一部探讨媒体,司法,和个人关系的影片,看完之后给我最大的感受就是愤怒和难过,社会舆论创造英雄和毁灭英雄的门槛太低了让我愤怒,无良媒体为了流量把未经证实的情况放在头版头条,口口声声说自己只是在报道事实令人啼笑皆非,恶心(让子弹飞);一个充满正义感的人被无端质疑让我难过,电影后段的一个情节,联邦调查组询问理查德“为什么炸弹爆炸时你刚好在安全的地方?”这句话既可气又可笑,理查德的回答是:“我只是在做好我的本职工作,你们有什么证据可以指控我吗?我不知道下一次某个保安看到可疑包裹还会不会去上报,因为他们不想成为下一个理查德。”
不可否认,电影刚开始时塑造理查德角色性格的时候,成功的让我对他抱有偏见,一直持续到爆炸发生时,都让我对这个角色抱有过度泛滥的正义感的偏见。但是看完后又会想到剧中的几个细节,给孕妇和警察送冷饮,争吵后给母亲道歉,面对媒体沉稳应对,与其说理查德是一个过度正义的人,不如说他是一个老实善良的人,在爆炸发生后媒体将他塑造成英雄为他出书,但接踵而来的是调查组对他的质疑,以及无良媒体的虚假报道,一个莫须有的罪名,就这样扣在了理查德的头上,这个发展趋势实在是充满了讽刺。
很多人无法理解为什么女记者会在发布会上流泪,不排除剪辑的锅,我觉得是被那句“我并不是需要你。”把骄傲的不可一世的她狠狠的拉回了现实,谁不渴求真相,在发现理查德根本没有作案时间后,听到联邦调查组说他有同伙时,我觉得她能感受到这只不过是调查组的挣扎罢了,电话亭这个细节已经在剧中多次出现,但是调查组选择忽视,因为我认为你存在问题,你就有很大的犯罪可能。只记得自己的偏见,却从未把理查德平时里善良正义的品行纳入参考。最后这位警察还在怀疑直至六年后真相水落石出,他们的行为也在一定程度上改变了理查德一家的命运,就像特百惠上的笔迹,不影响使用但确实存在。
看完之后让我想到了两外两部影片《狩猎》和《我们与恶的距离》这部电影好像就卡在这两部片子之间,没有狩猎悲哀,没有恶距离黑暗,在两部片子之中达成了平衡,让我反省和思考,庆幸我们的生活中没有这种情况,至少主流媒体不会将一个未经证实的信息发布,即使发布也会迅速做出纠错声明,但更应该思考的是我们每一个人,这部片子省去了民众对于男主的看法,剧中没有过多的情节来表现民众对他的认知,但不影响我们思考,对于网络信息一定要让子弹飞一会儿,雪崩时没有一片雪花是无辜的。
马丁路德金曾说:“手段代表着正在形成中的正义和正在实现中的理想,人无法通过不正义的手段去实现正义的目标,因为手段是种子而目的是树。”带着偏见去执行所谓的正义的人必将被人民所不齿----无良媒体和不公正的执法者以及键盘侠。
Watson生气的对Jewell说,这些破事怎么就不会让你像我这样气急败坏。Jewell当然生气,甚至不会有人比他更生气,但他就是不会将气愤表现出来。他两次捂住胸口甚至都没人看见,导演用片尾字幕44岁死于心脏病轻描淡写的呼应,更让他的人生令人扼腕。
Richard Jewell是个好人,彻头彻尾的好人,但人好
Watson生气的对Jewell说,这些破事怎么就不会让你像我这样气急败坏。Jewell当然生气,甚至不会有人比他更生气,但他就是不会将气愤表现出来。他两次捂住胸口甚至都没人看见,导演用片尾字幕44岁死于心脏病轻描淡写的呼应,更让他的人生令人扼腕。
Richard Jewell是个好人,彻头彻尾的好人,但人好的太彻底,就变成了烂好人。而烂好人的最大特点就是替一切人着想,对一切人解释一切人的行为原因。
他向来抄家的警察解释东西的用处,引来Watson的白眼;对母亲解释FBI行为的原因,遭到母亲的呵斥;甚至在因电视音量过大和母亲争执,导致母亲走到厕所哭泣的时候,还要和其他人解释,母亲哭泣的原因。他在自己糟透了的情况下,还在为让一切人能更好的理解眼前的事物而操心。
最让人窒息的不是黑暗,而是身处黑暗中的无力感。母亲哭着从厕所出来,不是埋怨儿子对自己大小声,而是哭诉自己不知道怎么从这些人中保护儿子。这是无能为力的绝望。
Kathy原本是个很有张力的角色,但没有设置好。她转变的有些生硬,前期太过强硬和不择手段,后期又突然变得怜悯和多愁善感。其实对于记者来说,第一手资料相当重要,当她得知FBI的调查对象时候,马上惊呼对就是他,我怎么没想到。是因为的确Jewell的一切背景资料太像会这样做的人。记者的第一职责就是报道真相。所以她的问题不在于是否报道,而在于她如何认定真相。她用逻辑可能推导真相属于判断能力的范畴,这和单纯的为了出名而捏造事实是不同的。因此如果前期少些张扬,后期省去眼泪。会让人减少一些恶的既定印象。我觉得这样更好是因为,对比于因恶而受害,因主观非恶而造成重大伤害,更值得我们思考。更能让人们在做出判断前更加谨慎。
在给Jewell送将他剔除出调查对象的通知时,Shaw警官依然认为Jewell就是罪犯。他为什么这么认定?我的感觉,是他将Jewell是调查对象透露出去的,这是严重违纪的事情。因此在他的心理判定上,只要将罪行坐实,Jewell就是罪犯。他还能自我安慰,我至少透露出去的是事实。但如果不是,那他不单是泄密,还是错的。他可能接受不了。因此原本应该不带任何倾向性的调查,变成了想方法坐实罪行。
所以就这么一次天雷勾地火的冲动,就让一个可能原本非恶的记者,和原本可能非恶的警察,变成了恶的最大推手。
结尾,启动调查88天后,Richard Jewell被排除出调查名单,并在6年后彻底洗清。但依然让人耿耿于怀。并非只是他的英年早逝。还有就是,Who Cares?对所有人来说Richard Jewell就是一个三十多岁了还和母亲住在一起的肥宅保安。是茶余饭后的谈资,而对于他被打得稀烂的生活,有谁在乎吗。
花絮:
1.Bobbi Jewell要求将Kenny Rogers的音乐会包含在电影中,她是他的忠实粉丝。
2.影片中音乐会和爆炸现场的拍摄地点,就是当时的亚特兰大百年奥林匹克公园的原始事件地点。
3.Paul Walter Hauser为了这个角色增重25磅。
4.剧本的素材来源包括一本叫《嫌疑人》(The Suspect)的书,是由时任佐治亚州北部地区美国检察官肯特·亚历山大 (Kent Alexander) 和1990年代《华尔街日报》(Wall Street Journal) 驻亚特兰大编辑凯文·萨尔文 (Kevin Salwen) 撰写的。记者 Kathy Scruggs 从未透露过她的消息来源。但《嫌疑人》中指向的是首席联邦调查局特工唐·约翰逊(Don Johnson)。在电影中,首席联邦调查局特工汤姆·肖(Tom Shaw)是虚构的名字。
5.Leonardo DiCaprio和Jonah Hill曾在某个时间点作为Watson和Richard的扮演者进入计划,但最终未能成型。不过他俩依然都是本片的执行制片。
6.爆炸后电视采访中的Richard Jewell是现实的Richard Jewell,只是声音被Paul Walter Hauser的所取代。
7.本片因描写Kathy Scruggs是通过性服务以换取情报而备受指责。现实中,没有证据表明她这么做了。
8.现实中,记者Kathy Scruggs一直与抑郁症与成瘾症作斗争,她于2001年因药物过量去世。
《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》个人观影随笔,欢迎理性讨论,不喜勿喷东木老爷子都快90岁了,还能拍出这样的电影,实在是令人敬佩,说来很奇怪,每次看老爷子的电影,不管是他主演还是他导演都特别稳,他拍的东西充满了一种沧桑感,对这个世界的理解和认知总是多了一层长辈的语境。
之前他拍的《萨利机长》,《换子疑云》,《骡子》都是根据真人真事改编的,似乎老爷子对现实世界有很多话想说,不管愤怒,还是感动,
《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》个人观影随笔,欢迎理性讨论,不喜勿喷东木老爷子都快90岁了,还能拍出这样的电影,实在是令人敬佩,说来很奇怪,每次看老爷子的电影,不管是他主演还是他导演都特别稳,他拍的东西充满了一种沧桑感,对这个世界的理解和认知总是多了一层长辈的语境。
之前他拍的《萨利机长》,《换子疑云》,《骡子》都是根据真人真事改编的,似乎老爷子对现实世界有很多话想说,不管愤怒,还是感动,这些电影都代表了一种态度,或左或右,我看短评里有些人说女权人士不喜欢,说老爷子是保守派等等,好吧,这些声音当然可以有,我却有不同的看法,不过保留吧,每个人都有自己都意见,只是电影怎么拍,他只是针对角色,就像昆汀拍《好莱坞往事》,有时候界限和创作是矛盾的,大家变得严肃谨慎,在这种只有一个声音的地方,我已经受够了冠冕堂皇和条条框框,希望能有个平衡吧,不敢说了。
说说电影吧,朱维尔的演员演出了很多角色内在的东西,把一个普普通通有缺点的人刻画的惟妙惟肖,当角色不听律师的话喃喃自语时,甚至真的有种想让他闭嘴的冲动,当然越是这样想,越是因为演得传神,还有律师山姆,他的很多角色都没什么区别,从最早看他的《月球》,《火柴人》到《三块广告牌》,好像都是一种人,不过很喜欢这种表演风格,有点痞痞的,目中无人的样子,很有个人魅力的演员。
看完电影后,我一直在想,如果我是理查德朱维尔,该如何为自己辩护?好人尽责值守,挽救生命却成了被告人,这种让好人蒙冤的情节,咱这也有,不过不能说,我可能会哭,会委屈,会咆哮,可我却不知道怎么表达,理查德朱维尔在最后对着联邦调查员说的话,其实比任何辩护都有力量,东木老爷子也在讽刺这些人,不过FBI和记者这两个角色,个人感觉不够立体,太脸谱化了,或许出了这种恐怖袭击事件,不管什么制度,都会有不负责任的各种坏人,这只跟人性有关!
好莱坞属于自由进步派的重灾区,两部近年来罕见的佳作在奥斯卡颗粒无收:《佛罗里达乐园》(2017)挑战儿童保护的政治正确,《巴斯特·斯克鲁格斯的歌谣》 (2018)不仅没有土著拯救白人的鸡汤,还涉嫌丑化土著和“身体受到挑战者”,政治严重不正确!
因此,《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》仅获得一项奥斯卡安慰性质的女配提名,也就完全可以理解了。
1996年7月27日晚,作为亚特兰大奥
好莱坞属于自由进步派的重灾区,两部近年来罕见的佳作在奥斯卡颗粒无收:《佛罗里达乐园》(2017)挑战儿童保护的政治正确,《巴斯特·斯克鲁格斯的歌谣》 (2018)不仅没有土著拯救白人的鸡汤,还涉嫌丑化土著和“身体受到挑战者”,政治严重不正确!
因此,《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》仅获得一项奥斯卡安慰性质的女配提名,也就完全可以理解了。
1996年7月27日晚,作为亚特兰大奥运会庆祝活动的中心,百年奥林匹克公园人山人海,保安理查德·朱维尔发现一个背包里藏有三枚炸弹,马上通知警方,并开始疏散人群。片刻,炸弹爆炸,炸死两人,100多人受伤。
朱维尔的果断行动避免了更大的伤亡,一个无名小卒至少拯救了上百人的生命,成为令亲朋自豪的英雄。然而,仅过三天,朱维尔的噩梦降临,从英雄变成恐怖分子嫌疑人。在FBI的策划下,朋友来他家吃饭都藏着窃听器。
在自由进步派的眼中,朱维尔是一个不合时宜的想当英雄的可笑的牛仔,吹毛求疵,爱出风头,“试图以轻微违法写出史诗般的警察报告”。
玩枪战游戏,朱维尔得分很高,他本身就是一个神枪手,职业理想是做FBI特工,保护他的国家和人民,这让他的律师朋友都觉得古怪和肉麻,瞬间让人想起伊斯特伍德《美国狙击手》引发笑场的台词:“保卫地球上最伟大的国家。”在自由进步派看来,不让政府伤害祖国才是唯一正确的爱国方式。
FBI向《亚特兰大宪法报》透露朱维尔有重大嫌疑,24小时监控,乖乖,这下可了不得,媒体如获至宝,捕风捉影的报道和犯罪心理侧写铺天盖地:朱维尔人生失败,一心想搞大新闻、逞英雄!
朱维尔是自由派媒体最厌恶的那种保守派青年,肥胖、妈宝男,家中的武器足以装备一个排。FBI将他家搜了个底朝天,一次不够就两次,连他母亲的保鲜盒都不放过。
客观而言,严密监控和搜查嫌疑人都是FBI的职责所在,但他们千不该万不该在没有切实证据的情况下就故意泄露怀疑对象,记者蜂拥而至,给朱维尔母子带来极大的困扰和痛苦。
媒体的长枪短炮锁定了朱维尔家的前门后院,NBC在直播中为朱维尔安上莫须有的罪名:“有人猜测,FBI即将提出指控,他们现在可能逮捕他,也许足以起诉他。”
面对媒体审判,母亲哭了:“我无法保护你。”朱维尔也在流泪:“对不起,妈妈,应该是我来保护你。”在律师的建议下,他顺利通过了测谎仪最高等级的的检测。
1996年10月,朱维尔总算洗清了罪名,开始起诉那些诽谤自己的媒体。1997年7月,美国司法部长公开表示,FBI不该泄露案件信息给《亚特兰大宪法报》,应当向朱维尔表示歉意。
2001年,朱维尔被授予印第安纳州卡梅尔独立日游行大元帅的称号,成为“无名英雄”的象征。2003年5月31日,制造了百年奥林匹克公园等多起爆炸案的恐怖分子鲁道夫被捕。
2006年,佐治亚州州长桑尼向朱维尔表示敬意,感谢他在爆炸案中的救援行动。2007年,朱维尔因病去世,年仅44岁。母亲认为,儿子之所以英年早逝,与媒体审判带来的身心伤害密切相关。
《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》不仅是朱维尔的英雄泪,也是克林特·伊斯特伍德对进步派、多元化的强烈抗议:欧美媒体和大学、政治精英,塑造了一种弱即正义的社会氛围。
以艺术品质而言,《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》不算伊斯特伍德最好的作品,但在政治正确的氛围中为真正的弱者呐喊,对自由进步派嗤之以鼻,这是一个老牛仔最后的倔强。
今晚看了Clint Eastwood大爷的片子《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》,居然想写点东西。
今晚看了Clint Eastwood大爷的片子《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》,居然想写点东西。
仅为和一些友邻交流看法而写。
朱维尔,一个收藏大量枪支的军迷,梦想当抓坏人的警察,生怕大型公共事件出意外而戒备异常,在受到FBI质询的时候依然从自诩“专业”的角度为权力机关辩护,因为“我从小被教育要尊重国家政权”,用网络语言来概括,朱维尔可以说是标准的“红脖”了。
在通常的解读中,电影
仅为和一些友邻交流看法而写。
朱维尔,一个收藏大量枪支的军迷,梦想当抓坏人的警察,生怕大型公共事件出意外而戒备异常,在受到FBI质询的时候依然从自诩“专业”的角度为权力机关辩护,因为“我从小被教育要尊重国家政权”,用网络语言来概括,朱维尔可以说是标准的“红脖”了。
在通常的解读中,电影的关键情节无疑是美女记者色诱FBI高层套取他们怀疑朱维尔的猜测而率先报道扬名立万,通过这一情节及其结果,人们自然会想到记者“第四权力”、媒体利润与国家公权力关系等相关主题。
这些主题当然很有价值,如何评论也见仁见智。但是,从中国的语境来看,却可以得出一个完全出于导演意图之外的解读。
在国内也有这样一大群人,动不动就把“蒸汁影响”“国际观瞻”“被人利用”挂在嘴边,他们本身像朱维尔一样在这个社会上没什么话事权,但却无时无刻不在为国家的高大形象和社会稳定操着心,甚至不惜干涉别人的生活,或者像朱维尔一样“善良地”破坏一下国家的法律。这些人,消极的是套中人,积极的就是朱维尔了。
而在电影中,导演却为我们讲述了一个这样热心维稳的人被他顶礼膜拜的维稳机关怀疑和干涉的故事,让我在看电影的时候阴暗地产生了一种复仇的快感。事后我也思考过为什么我会做出这种偏题的解读,如果一个不知道中国式朱维尔和套中人为何物的人看这个电影,也未必会认同朱维尔的行事风格和立场,可因为导演强势引入“媒体”这一角色而冲淡了人们对朱维尔的评价,从而观众就会去思考别的话题了。
但是,在中国的语境下,除了这个主题,我们还可以去思考个人维稳逻辑与国家维稳逻辑的关系这一主题,因为电影不仅表现了媒体的故事,还表现了国家维稳思路和个人维稳思路互相冲突与否定的故事,而媒体在这一过程中,并没有起到什么作用(如果没有媒体,FBI也会来搜朱维尔的家,也会把他叫去喝茶等等)。
我并不是说朱维尔发现炸弹的行为不是英雄的,从人道主义的角度来看,一个人发现了炸弹,挽救了别人的生命,当然需要表彰。我想说的是,在生活中一个整日眼观八方又疑神疑鬼的人,不能不说是让人讨厌的。特别是在一个苦于有太多太多朱维尔的社会,这能从这样一部电影中读出来讽刺的意味,也算是跨文化交流的案例了吧。
年度黑马 比起年底排片和口碑双丰收的 利刃出鞘 这部上映的悄无声息 排片也少得可怜 不是冲着老爷子的名号可能就错过了
同样是真实故事改编 比起萨利 更被这部打动 老爷子实在太擅长讲这类故事了 从人本身出发 挖掘延伸 大概我永远也拒绝不了这类故事 比起Sully Richard身上 更能看到自己的某部分的缩影 容易满足也极易丧气 抱着幻想又不够脚踏实地 守着心里的一点点热忱和善良
年度黑马 比起年底排片和口碑双丰收的 利刃出鞘 这部上映的悄无声息 排片也少得可怜 不是冲着老爷子的名号可能就错过了
同样是真实故事改编 比起萨利 更被这部打动 老爷子实在太擅长讲这类故事了 从人本身出发 挖掘延伸 大概我永远也拒绝不了这类故事 比起Sully Richard身上 更能看到自己的某部分的缩影 容易满足也极易丧气 抱着幻想又不够脚踏实地 守着心里的一点点热忱和善良 还有微不足道的英雄梦想 按部就班 浑浑噩噩的过日子 他代表的不是少数 某一类人 他代表的是 平凡又普通的 大多数
迅速击溃我的部分 在FBI大摇大摆冲进Richard家四处取证 在那句 “警察对警察”后 沃森臭骂Richard开始 那一刻我才惊觉Richard如此善良 从那一part开始 心里开始升腾起巨大的难过 在母亲躲在卫生间哭过后抱着Richard说“怪我没有保护好你” 在发布会母亲极力镇定最终却哽咽着捂脸说求媒体记者放过Richard放过他们一家 在FBI最终审讯后镜头停在门上那个联邦政府的logo 一层一层的难过堆叠起来 即使从进影院前已经知道故事的定版 依然忍不住颤抖
老爷子在这部电影里对故事的表现手法依然 十分克制 全片几乎没有什么激烈的冲突 印象最深的是那个跳切到几乎有些生硬的蒙太奇 像是在刻意将观众的注意力从故事情节里拉出来 三天内两部电影看下来对老爷子的个人风格有了一定的了解 个人风格真的太重要了 能将讲好故事作为毕生追求的人太幸福了 国内多几个这种踏踏实实讲好故事的导演就好了
文/铃鼓先生
公众号:抛开书本(paokaisb)
毫无疑问,克林特·伊斯特伍德是高龄高产高质量的导演,近年来以每年一部的速度产出优篇佳作,称其为“活着的传奇”毫不为过。作为“好莱坞最后的右派”,也许正因为他,好莱坞才保有了真正意义上的“多元”。
文/铃鼓先生
公众号:抛开书本(paokaisb)
毫无疑问,克林特·伊斯特伍德是高龄高产高质量的导演,近年来以每年一部的速度产出优篇佳作,称其为“活着的传奇”毫不为过。作为“好莱坞最后的右派”,也许正因为他,好莱坞才保有了真正意义上的“多元”。
寒假惊奇地发现老家丽水居然还有Richard Jewell的排片,立马就去看了。之前只看过东木老爷子的《百万美元宝贝》,对他不甚了解。但单从这部和《百》来看,着实可以看出他的过人之处:不用很多的技巧修饰,利用故事本身来打动观众。在我来看,他是一个具有“内力”的导演;可能也是因为将近耄耋的高龄,他的作品因而显得精准有力。现实题材与写实主义的风格无疑最大程度体现了他这种“内力”;
寒假惊奇地发现老家丽水居然还有Richard Jewell的排片,立马就去看了。之前只看过东木老爷子的《百万美元宝贝》,对他不甚了解。但单从这部和《百》来看,着实可以看出他的过人之处:不用很多的技巧修饰,利用故事本身来打动观众。在我来看,他是一个具有“内力”的导演;可能也是因为将近耄耋的高龄,他的作品因而显得精准有力。现实题材与写实主义的风格无疑最大程度体现了他这种“内力”;同时,同等程度地,将演员的演技无限的放大。山姆洛克威尔、乔恩哈姆等人贡献了优秀的表演;保罗沃尔特豪泽(终于不需要演类似于《黑色党徒》《我,托尼娅》里面的胖傻叉了!),本片的男主,堪称完美的人选;而最最让我感动与惊讶的是男主母亲,扮演者凯西贝茨的表演(爆奶今年奥提!)。那段发言的表演过于真实,丝毫没有修饰的痕迹。我看过很多的哭戏,几乎没有一个像这样富有层次与感染力,既内敛同时有张力。就像影片中所说的那样,她的表演完美的诠释了truth而不是fact。很庆幸能在家乡看了如此动人的新年第一部。可笑的是,家乡当地仅有的三家艺术影院之中,作为丽水地区电影院的“霸主”、本应该引领地区的某两影院,却如同吝啬鬼一般的不给真正的CINIMA一次上映的机会,而给某些辣鸡“视频”(恕我直言)以大量场次。而相比之下一个几乎无人问津的小资影厅,却拥有相当的职业的当担与操守。其实不只是我家乡,全国各地情况都是如此,例如同样加入艺联的著名的某达影院,也几乎没有《朱》与《别》的排片。我大学不修经济,仅以高中知识,我不是特别清楚这里面供求关系。但我确切地意识到,如果市场只单方面提供娱乐向的“游乐园式”的电影而忽略了这些艺术电影,也行将来的观众们会认为电影只是用来娱乐的,马丁的预言或将实现。我相信这就是艺术电影联盟为艺术电影奋斗的原因,特别是为了中国电影事业的未来。而那部分唯利是图的商人,自以为在经济上为中国电影事业尽一份力,实则可能真的荼毒了万千的观众,断送中国电影的未来。我看的那个场次,到场的观众寥寥无几;也许都是电影爱好者,出现片尾CAST的时候,许久,大家都没有动弹。在寥寥无几的观众里,我惊讶地发现了两个十多岁的小朋友。在幽暗的影厅里,在他们眼神中,我似乎看到了灼烈的焰火。我没有老到可以感慨岁月流逝白驹过隙、时间的不易,但我看到他们时,我可以说,我看见了电影的某种未来,一种我期待的未来。有时我会想,这些电影真的就那么“艺术”吗?难道真的就那么无聊、枯燥以至于大家都不想看吗?中国电影票房真的只能靠“话题“流量”来支持吗?我以我亲身体会来看:非也。仅以这部而言,观影的门槛很低,懂电影的人也许能看到更多,不大懂的人也能感受它的魅力。连小孩子都来看,为什么成年人不行呢?更何况最近佳片稀少,《朱》与《别》理应加大排片量。其实,更重要的,不是供应不足,而是需求不够,是很多人没有做出尝试。横向比较于类似的艺术形式,书的普及应该算是很成功的了。既然书能够做到,为什么电影不能呢?我一直认为电影的商业形式是双向性的,就像没去过海边不知道海有多宽广一样,没多看佳片的人是不知道电影的艺术有多美。我由衷希望未来有更多的人能像从小学习看书、绘画、声乐一样,学会看电影、欣赏电影;把它当做一门艺术,而不是娱乐大众的道具。以上只是一位初级电影爱好者浅薄的感想。其实自高考以后,我就再也不想写文章了;但是今天今夜,我感受到了信仰的召唤。
做好人是一种任性,这句话,是我在7年前的知乎日报app上看到的一篇文章的标题,大概就是说,为什么生活中存在像男主角理查德这样的人,明明知道做好人很有可能是没有好报的,还是要执意做一个好人呢?大概是任性吧。
看这部电影的时候,我感到很气愤,总会在主人公的身上看到自己的影子,虽然主人公在很大程度上比我更加社会化,更加有自己的坚持,他极富有正义感,警察技能熟练,会在晚上学习法律,很喜欢
做好人是一种任性,这句话,是我在7年前的知乎日报app上看到的一篇文章的标题,大概就是说,为什么生活中存在像男主角理查德这样的人,明明知道做好人很有可能是没有好报的,还是要执意做一个好人呢?大概是任性吧。
看这部电影的时候,我感到很气愤,总会在主人公的身上看到自己的影子,虽然主人公在很大程度上比我更加社会化,更加有自己的坚持,他极富有正义感,警察技能熟练,会在晚上学习法律,很喜欢军事射击,简直就是一位天生成为好警察的料,可惜现实生活中的他,离开副警官的职位之后,多次的保安就职经历都不太顺利,以解雇作为终点。好吧,在我看来,他做保安也是屈才了。
想起了主人公说了一句话,我曾经把成为一名FBI的警察作为自己的职业梦想,但是我现在发现,你们不去抓捕真正的爆炸案罪犯,反而在这里不断地臆想理查德是罪犯,我一点也不想成为FBI警察了。
理查德虽然是一位看上去“完美”的嫌犯,失意的白人,前警察背景,懂得炸药知识,还是第一个发现爆炸的人,之前还有大学院长说,他做保安的时候,是一个喜欢表现自己的人。其实,他只是,一个善良的富有正义感的保安,他只是在履行自己的职能,尽管他当天可以请病假的,就像他说的,没有人愿意做尽职的保安了,只要看到可疑的包裹跑就好了,这大概就是职场中,多做多错,少做不错的同样场景的还原。说到尽职,戏中的警察、记者大概是称不上了。
虽然,主人公在发现家中装置了窃听设备之后,和律师大吵了一架,说我就是没有办法变成你这样啊,我就是我啊,我很生气,但是我没有表露出来啊。为什么选择你作为我的律师,因为,你是唯一不把我当作5岁小孩字的人。
在我看来,在某种象征层面上来说,主人公和律师是人生的不同阶段的象征,终究要反击,要保持愤怒,要变强大。这大概是最近这段时间自己的生活感悟把。
On July 30, 1996, the media identified Richard Jewell as the F.B.I.'s prime suspect in the Olympic Park bombing. For the first time, the 34-year-old security guard tells his extraordi【详细】On July 30, 1996, the media identified Richard Jewell as the F.B.I.'s prime suspect in the Olympic Park bombing. For the first time, the 34-year-old security guard tells his extraordinary story, to MARIE BRENNER: his brief moment as a national hero, his hounding by the Feds and the press, and his eccentric friendship with the unknown southern lawyer who helped him through his public torment.FEBRUARY 1997 MARIE BRENNERDAN WINTERSThe search warrant was short and succinct, dated August 3, 9:41 A.M. F.B.I. special agent Diader Rosario was instructed to produce "hair samples (twenty-five pulled and twenty-five combed hairs from the head)" of Richard Allensworth Jewell. That Saturday, Atlanta was humid; the temperature would rise to 85 degrees. There were 34 Olympic events scheduled, including women's team handball, but Richard Jewell was in his mother's apartment playing Defender on a computer set up in the spare bedroom. Jewell hadn't slept at all the night before, or the night before that. He could hear the noise from the throng of reporters massed on the hill outside the small apartment in the suburbs. All morning long, he had been focused on the screen, trying to score off "the little guy who goes back and forth shooting the aliens," but at 12:30 the sound of the telephone disturbed his concentration. Very few people had his new number, by necessity unlisted. Since the F.B.I. had singled him out as the Olympic Park bombing suspect three days earlier, Jewell had received approximately 1,000 calls a day—someone had posted his mother's home number on the Internet."I'll be right over," his lawyer Watson Bryant told him. "They want your hair, they want your palm prints, and they want something called a voice exemplar—the goddamn bastards." The curtains were drawn in the pastel apartment filled with his mother's crafts and samplers; A HOME WITHOUT A DOG IS JUST A HOUSE, one read. By this time Bryant had a system. He would call Jewell from his car phone so that the door could be unlatched and Bryant could avoid the questions from the phalanx of reporters on the hill.Turning into the parking lot in a white Explorer, Bryant could see sound trucks parked up and down Buford Highway. The middle-class neighborhood of apartment complexes and shopping centers was near the DeKalb Peachtree Airport, where local millionaires kept their private planes. The moment Bryant got out of his car, the reporters began to shout: "Hey, Watson, do they have the murderer?" "Are they arresting Jewell?" Bryant moved quickly toward the staircase to the Jewells' apartment. He wore a baseball cap, khaki shorts, and a frayed Brooks Brothers polo shirt. He was 45 years old, with strong features and thinning hair, a southern preppy from a country-club family. Bryant had a stern demeanor lightened by a contrarian's sense of the absurd. He was often distracted—from time to time he would miss his exits on the highway—and he had the regional tendency of defining himself by explaining what he was not. "I am not a Democrat, because they want your money. I am not a Republican, because they take your rights away," he told me soon after I met him. Bryant can talk your ear off about the Bill of Rights, ending with a flourish: "I think everyone ought to have the right to be stupid. I am a Libertarian."At the time Richard Jewell was named as a suspect by the F.B.I., Watson Bryant made a modest living by doing real-estate closings in the suburbs, but Jewell and his lawyer had formed an unusual friendship a decade earlier, when Jewell worked as a mailroom clerk at a federal disaster-relief agency where Bryant practiced law. Jewell was then a stocky kid without a father, who had trained as an auto mechanic but dreamed of being a policeman; Bryant had always had a soft spot for oddballs and strays, a personality quirk which annoyed his then wife no end.The serendipity of this friendship, an alliance particularly southern in its eccentricity, would bring Watson Bryant to the immense task of attempting to save Richard Jewell from the murky quagmire of a national terrorism case. The simple fact was that Bryant had no qualifications for the job. He had no legal staff except for his assistant, Nadya Light, no contacts in the press, and no history in Washington. He was the opposite of media-savvy; he rarely read the papers and never watched the nightly news, preferring the Discovery Channel's shows on dog psychology. Now that Richard Jewell was his client, he had entered a zone of worldwide media hysteria fraught with potential peril. Jewell suspected that his pickup truck had been flown in a C-130 transport plane to the F.B.I. unit at Quantico in Virginia, and Bryant worried that his friend would be arrested any minute. Worse, Bryant knew that he had nothing going for him, no levers anywhere. His only asset was his personality; he had the bravado and profane hyperbole of a southern rich boy, but he was in way over his head.For hours that Saturday, Bryant and Jewell sat and waited for the F.B.I. From time to time Jewell would put binoculars under the drawn curtain in his mother's bedroom to peer at the reporters on the hill. Bryant was nervous that Jewell's mother, Bobi, would return from baby-sitting and see her son having hairs pulled out of his head. Bryant stalked around the apartment complaining about the F.B.I. "The sons of bitches did not show up until three P.M.," he later recalled, and when they did, there were five of them. The F.B.I. medic was tall and muscular and wore rubber gloves. He asked Jewell to sit at a small round table in the living room, where his mother puts her holiday-theme displays. Bryant stood by the sofa next to a portrait of Jewell in his Habersham County deputy's uniform. He watched the F.B.I. procedure carefully. The medic, who had huge hands, used tiny drugstore tweezers. "He eyeballed his scalp and took his hair in sections. First he ran a comb through it, and then he took these hairs and plucked them out one by one."Jewell "went stone-cold," but Bryant could not contain his temper. "I am his lawyer. I know you can have this, I know you have a search warrant, but I tell you this: If you were doing this to me, you would have to fight me. You would have to beat the shit out of me," Bryant recalled telling the case agent Ed Bazar. Bazar, Bryant later said, was apologetic. "He seemed almost embarrassed to be there." As he counted out the hairs, he placed them in an envelope. The irony of the situation was not lost on Bryant. He was a lawyer, an officer of the court, but he had a disdain for authority, and he was representing a former deputy who read the Georgia law code for fun in his spare time.It took 10 minutes to pluck Jewell's thick auburn hair. Then the F.B.I. agents led him into the kitchen and took his palm prints on the table. "That took 30 minutes, and they got ink all over the table," Bryant said. Then Bazar told Bryant they wanted Jewell to sit on the sofa and say into the telephone, "There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes." That was the message given by the 911 caller on the night of the bombing. He was to repeat the message 12 times. Bryant saw the possibility of phony evidence and of his client's going to jail. "I said, 'I am not sure about this. Maybe you can do this, maybe you can't, but you are not doing this today.'"All afternoon, Jewell was strangely quiet. He had a sophisticated knowledge of police work and believed, he later said, "they must have had some evidence if they wanted my hair. ... I knew their game was intimidation. That is why they brought five agents instead of two." He felt "violated and humiliated," he told me, but he was passive, even docile, through Bryant's outburst. He thought of the bombing victims— Alice Hawthorne, the 44-year-old mother from Albany, Georgia, at the park with her stepdaughter; Melih Uzunyol, the Turkish cameraman who died of a heart attack; the more than 100 people taken to area hospitals, some of whom were his friends. "I kept thinking, These guys think I did this. These guys were accusing me of murder. This was the biggest case in the nation and the world. If they could pin it on me, they were going to put me in the electric chair."I met Richard Jewell three months later, on October 28, a few hours before a press conference called by his lawyers to allow Jewell to speak publicly for the first time since the F.B.I. had cleared him. Jewell's lawyers also intended to announce that they would file damage suits against NBC and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was a Monday, and that weekend the local U.S. attorney had delivered a letter to one of the lawyers stating Jewell was no longer a suspect. "Goddamn it," Bryant had told me on the phone, "the sons of bitches did not even have the decency to address it to Richard Jewell."I had been instructed to come early to the offices of Wood & Grant, the flashy plaintiff lawyers Bryant had pulled in to help him with Jewell's civil suits. When I arrived, I was alone in the office with Sharon Anderson, the redheaded assistant answering the phones. "Wood & Grant . . . Wood & Grant . . . Wood & Grant"—the calls overwhelmed her. Lin Wood and Wayne Grant were rushing from CNN to the local NBC and ABC affiliates, working the shows. "Everyone has theories of who the real bomber is," Sharon said. "I just write it all down and give it to the boys."When Lin Wood arrived, he was still in full makeup. Movie-star handsome with green eyes and styled hair, Wood has the heated oratory of a trial lawyer. "It's a war! Why in this bevy of stories does not anyone point out the fact that Richard was a hero one day and a demon the next? They have destroyed this man's life!"Watson Bryant had worked with Wood and Grant years before in a local law firm. He admired Wayne Grant for his methodical sense of detail; Grant, a New Yorker, had once forced the city of Atlanta to pay large damages to a man injured while illegally digging for antique bottles in a park. But Lin Wood's suppressed rage was a marvel to Bryant. "He is so tough he could make people cry in depositions when we were kids," Bryant told me. Wood possessed the smooth style of a member of the Atlanta establishment, but he had a hardscrabble past. He was a boy from "the wrong side of the tracks" in Macon who at age 17 discovered his mother's body after his father had murdered her. His father went to jail, and Wood wound up as a lawyer. He went through college and law school on scholarships and with part-time jobs. I could hear Wood on Sharon's telephone: "He's more than innocent. He's a goddamn hero. . . . Everyone is going to pay who wronged Richard Jewell. Besides NBC and The A.J.C., we are going to look into suing CNN and Jay Leno."Through the large picture window, I had a clear view of the remains of the Centennial Olympic Park, where the bomb had exploded on the night of July 26. Where the sound-and-light tower had once been, there was now a flattened dirt field. It was possible to see the Greek commemorative sculpture that Richard Jewell used to describe for tourists at the AT&T pavilion, where he worked as a security guard.Suddenly, Jewell was in the room. "Hi. I'm Richard. I'm a little late. I don't want you to think I am rude. I am not like that." He had an open face, a bland pleasantness, an eagerness to please. "Can I get you a Coke?" he asked me. "How about some coffee?" Jewell wore a blue-and-white striped shirt and chinos. He occupied physical space like a teenager; he sprawled, he lumbered, he pawed through Sharon's candy bowl. On TV his face had a porcine blankness; he appeared suspicious. In person, Jewell has a hard time disguising his emotions.We were alone in the conference room; I noticed that Jewell avoided looking out the window toward the park. He shifted his glance nervously away from the view. He often awakens in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, thinking of the events in the park in the early morning hours of July 27. "It took me days before I could even come in here," he said anxiously.The newsroom atmosphere resembled that at F.B.I. headquarters; there was a frenzy to be first.When Jewell noticed a local ABC reporter outside near Sharon's desk, his face darkened. "I don't want to be around reporters right now. I guess I am a little nervous. What is he doing here?" The atmosphere was now filled with tension; the reporter was escorted out.Moments later, we gathered in the hallway. Wood was steely: "We are going in two cars. Richard, you drive with me. Your mother will go with Wayne. As we walk down the hall right now, if the ABC people are outside, I will tap you on the shoulder and I will say, 'How are you doing?' You will say, 'Fine.' Is that understood?" "O.K., Lin. I understand," Jewell said quietly, head bowed.As Jewell walked down the hall, an ABC cameraman photographed him looking grim. Seconds after the elevator doors closed, Jewell exploded: "What are they doing here, Lin? Did you invite them? They are animals. Why didn't you get them out of here?""ABC has been good to you. How do I get them out of the office on the day of your press conference?""That is what security is for!" Jewell said, quivering with rage. "Where is Watson?" he asked in the garage. "I told you: he's at a real-estate closing. He will meet you at the press conference," Wood said. Jewell moved to his mother's side, as solicitous as a child. "Are you all right, Mother?" he asked. "It is all I am going to be able to do not to do something!" she said angrily.When we arrived at the Marriott hotel on 1-75, there was another discussion in the parking lot, about who would walk with whom in front of the cameras. Jewell turned to his close friend Dave Dutchess: "Are you all right, man?" Dutchess, a truckdriver who worked with Jewell years ago, has long hair and a tattoo of a panther on his forearm. "Richard and I are like brothers," he told me. "I would die for him." As the cameras closed in on them, the group fled to a private room in the Marriott. The auditorium was filled with reporters. "Showtime! Showtime!" the cameramen yelled when Jewell, his mother, and all the lawyers took the stage."I hope and pray that no one else is ever subjected to the pain and the ordeal that I have gone through," Jewell said, his voice breaking. "The authorities should keep in mind the rights of the citizens. I thank God it is ended and that you now know what I have known all along: I am an innocent man."After the press conference, Bobi and Richard Jewell remained in a private room. The bookers from Good Morning America and the Today show pressed Jewell to step before their cameras, and when Watson Bryant told them no, Monica, the G.M.A. booker, began to cry, "I'll lose my job." Then Yael, the Today-show booker, cornered Nadya Light: "Is Richard doing something with G.M.A.?'Upstairs, Jewell and his mother were being filmed by a CBS camera crew for a 60 Minutes news update. "Well, Bobi, did you get your Tupperware back?" Mike Wallace asked by phone from New York. "Richard, you need to lose some more weight." Despite Wallace's festive spirit, the atmosphere was curiously flat. Bryant urged Jewell to talk to a USA Today reporter. Jewell balked: "They can all go suck wind."In the car on the way back to Wood & Grant, Bobi was angry. All of her possessions had come back from the F.B.I. marked up with ink. "Every piece of Tupperware I own is ruined, thank you very much. They wrote numbers all over it, and I have tried everything to clean it—Comet and Brillo—but nothing works."Back at the office, she sat on the sofa and listened as Bryant negotiated with Yael for a flight to New York— Delta, first-class, 9:30 P.M. Jewell was scheduled to appear on three shows in New York, visit the American Museum of Natural History, and then fly to Washington, D.C., for Larry King Live. "I would like to go home, put on my outfit, and walk in the woods," Bobi said. "Richard, we are leaving.""Yes, ma'am," Richard said.One hour later, a telephone call came in to the offices of Wood & Grant. The lawyers had the call on speaker, and it blared through the room. "Goddamn it, Lin. When will this be over?" In the background, you could hear Bobi sobbing. "What in the world?" Wood asked. Jewell explained that a sound truck from ABC had been waiting in the parking lot when the Jewells got home. There had been words and threats, and Dave Dutchess had taken his stun gun off his motorcycle and waved it at the ABC van. The cameraman yelled: Stop harassing us! Dave yelled back: You are harassing us! Now get your ass out of here!Wood shouted into the speakerphone: "Do not meddle! You cannot jeopardize where you have gotten to and what you want to do! All you have to do is put up with this for one more day and the damn thing is over. Bobi, there is nothing you can do about it; you have to stay cool." Bobi cried back, "They are going to destroy me!"The moment they hung up, Wood turned to Bryant. "New York is canceled. No Katie Couric. No Good Morning America. They are losing it. You better call Yael." "No," Bryant said, "they have lost it. All of the above: their patience, their temper and heart."That evening a very testy Katie Couric tracked Bryant down at Nadya Light's apartment, where we had gone to watch the news. "I want you to know that I canceled interviewing Barbra Streisand in L.A. for Richard Jewell. Don't think he is always going to be a news story. No one will care about him in three days," she said, according to Bryant. "Look, Katie, I am sorry. But Richard is in no condition to talk to the press. He is worn out," Bryant told her.Later, Jewell would tell me that that day, which should have been one of his most satisfying, was actually his worst. His notoriety had tainted the triumph; everything positive had become negative. "I was in despair," he said. As he had for most of the previous 88 days, he spent the night confined in the Buford Highway apartment, a prisoner of his circumstances, with his mother, Dave Dutchess, and Dave's fiancee, Beatty, eating Domino's Pizza and watching himself lead the newscasts on NBC, CBS, and ABC."This case has everything—the F.B.I., the press, the violation of the Bill of Rights from the First to the Sixth Amendment."'This case has everything— the F.B.I., the press, the violation of the Bill of Rights, from the First to the Sixth Amendment," Watson Bryant told me in one of our first conversations. It has become common to characterize the F.B.I.'s investigation of Richard Jewell as the epitome of false accusation. The phrase "the Jewell syndrome," a rush to judgment, has entered the language of newsrooms and First Amendment forums. On the night of Jewell's press conference, a commentator on CNN's Crossfire compared Jewell's situation to "Kafka in Prague." The case became an investigative catastrophe, which laid bare long-simmering resentments of many F.B.I. career professionals regarding the micromanagement style and imperious attitude of Louis Freeh and his inner circle of former New York prosecutors, who have worked together since their days at the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District. Within the bureau, the beleaguered director now has a new nickname: J. Edgar Hoover with children. Like Freeh, those near him have also acquired a nickname: Louie's yes-men. Two of Freeh's closest associates, F.B.I. general counsel Howard Shapiro and former deputy director Larry Potts, have been severely criticized, respectively, for advising the White House of confidential F.B.I. material and for an alleged cover-up of the mishandling of the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, where F.B.I. agents killed the wife and son of Randy Weaver, a white supremacist.In November and December, the Office of Professional Responsibility conducted an exhaustive investigation into the Jewell affair. Responding to an attempt by headquarters and certain officials to distance themselves, according to F.B.I. sources, several agents, including a senior F.B.I. supervisor in Atlanta, have provided the O.P.R. with signed statements insisting that Freeh himself was responsible for "oversight" during the crisis. These agents "shocked the investigators" because they reiterated, when asked who was in charge of the overall command of the investigation, that it was the director himself.What happened to Richard Jewell raises an important question central to Freeh's future tenure: in the midst of a media frenzy, does the F.B.I. have any responsibility to protect the privacy of an innocent man? Over the last year, this concept was broached with Bob Bucknam, Louis Freeh's chief of staff. During the long Pizza Connection trial in the 1980s, it was Bucknam who handed Freeh files at the prosecutor's table. According to highly placed sources in the bureau, Bucknam's answer was immediate: the F.B.I. has no responsibility to correct information in the public domain.Richard Jewell had a reverence for authority that blinded him to the paradox of his situation. He idealized the investigative skills of the F.B.I. and could not understand that he had become ensnared in a web fraught with the weaknesses of a self-protective bureaucracy. Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter has invited Jewell to Washington to testify at congressional hearings on the F.B.I.'s conduct in the Atlanta bombing. Ironically, the bungling of the investigation might lead to the reshuffling of personalities at the top of the bureau and threaten Freeh's reputation. In October, according to The Washington Post, Freeh sent an unusual memo to all 25,000 F.B.I. personnel: He would not be abandoning his post amid reports of problems with the Jewell case and Filegate, and of a growing dissatisfaction inside the bureau. "I am proud to be the F.B.I. director," Freeh wrote.From the beginning, Jewell was perceived in the public imagination as a hapless dummy, a plodding misfit, a Forrest Gump. On one of the first days he worked as a security guard at the AT&T pavilion, he noticed that his co-workers were covering the steps inside the sound tower with graffiti. On one step Jewell scrawled with a flourish two bromides: IF YOU DIDN'T GO PAST ME, YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE and LIFE IS TOUGH. TOUGHER WHEN YOU ARE STUPID. Soon after he was targeted as a suspect in the Olympics bombing, the F.B.I. confiscated the step. Analysts appeared to believe that the graffiti contained a clue to his character. "They told the lawyers the statement was an obvious taunt," Jewell said. In fact, the second line was an expression he had cribbed from one of his favorite actors, John Wayne.Within the F.B.I., the beleaguered director has a new nickname: J. Edgar Hoover with children."To understand Richard Jewell, you have to be aware that he is a cop. He talks like a cop and thinks like a cop," his criminal lawyer, Jack Martin, told me. The tone of Jewell's voice drops noticeably when he says the word "officer," and his conversation is filled with observations about traffic patterns, security devices, and car wrecks. Even the vocabulary he uses to describe the 88 days he was a suspect is out of the lexicon of police work, and he continues to talk about his situation then in the present tense: "This is an out-and-out ambush, and I am a hostage."Jewell has a need to accommodate. He can be startlingly opaque. On the afternoon of July 30, Jewell answered the door of his mother's apartment to Don Johnson and Diader Rosario from the F.B.I. "We need your help making a training film," they told him. "I never questioned it," he told me. The next day Rosario appeared again with a search warrant. "The weird thing was that when they were searching my apartment I was, like, 'Take everything. Take the carpet. I am law enforcement. I am just like you. Guys, take whatever you are going to take, because it is going to prove that I didn't do anything.' And a couple of them were looking at me like I was crazy."Leaving the apartment on one occasion, he told the agents, "I am wearing a bright shirt so y'all can see me easier." He recalled feeling anger when he read descriptions of himself as a child-man, a mama's boy, and "a wannabe policeman," but he said, "If I was in the place of everybody else and I saw a 34-year-old guy living with his mother, I would have reservations about that, too. I would think, Why is he doing that?"The December issue of Atlanta magazine reported that there was no record of a Jewell family in Danville, Virginia, where Richard Jewell was born. Atlanta referred to an article in the Danville Register & Bee which asked, "Did Richard Jewell ever sleep here?" "This is a part of my life Richard and I do not like to speak about," Bobi Jewell told me one night at dinner. Richard was born in Danville, but his name was Richard White; his father was Bobi's first husband, Robert Earl White, who worked for Chevrolet. According to Bobi, Richard's father, who died recently, was "irresponsible and a ladies' man." When Richard was four, the marriage broke up. Bobi found work as an insurance-agency claims coordinator and soon met John Jewell, an executive in the same business. Shortly after John Jewell married Bobi, he adopted Richard.From the time Richard was a child, he and his mother were a unit. Bobi, a woman of intelligence and disciplined work habits, is both tender and tough on the subject of her son. She still calls Richard "my boy," but she has a peppery disposition. Richard was brought up in a strict Baptist home. "If I didn't say 'Yes, ma'am' or 'No, ma'am' and get it out quick enough, I would be on the ground," he said. When he was six, the family moved to Atlanta. Richard was the boy who helped the teachers and worked as a school crossing guard, but he had few friends in high school. "I was a wannabe athlete, but I wasn't good enough," he said. He ran the movie projector in the library. A military-history buff, he liked to talk about Napoleon and the Vietnam War and read books on both World Wars.Jewell's ambition was to work on cars, so he enrolled in a technical school in southern Georgia. On his third day there, Bobi discovered that her husband had packed a suitcase. "He left a note saying that he was a failure and no good for us," Jewell said. Almost immediately, Richard moved back home and took a job repairing cars. "My mom and I tried to take care of each other," he said. "I think I handled it pretty much better than she did." Richard took the brunt of his father's abandonment; Bobi pulled even closer to her son. "She hated all men for about three years after that, and she became overly protective of me. She looked at it that I was going to do the same thing that my dad did. I was 18 or 19. I was working. She never liked my dates, but I never held that against her. We have always been able to lean on each other."Richard managed a local TCBY yogurt shop and once stopped a burglary in progress. At the age of 22, he was hired as a clerk at the Small Business Administration, and he impressed Watson Bryant and the other lawyers in the office with his personable nature. They called him Radar because of his efficiency. "You could say, 'I'm hungry,' and suddenly this kid would be by your side with a Snickers bar," Bryant recalled. When Jewell's contract with the S.B.A. ran out, he moved on to be a Marriott house detective. In 1990 he was hired as a jailer in the Habersham County Sheriff's Office, and in 1991 he became a deputy. As part of his training, he was sent to the Northeast Georgia Police Academy, where he finished in the upper 25 percent of his class. He finally had an identity; he was a law-enforcement officer.Jewell was unlucky in love. He presented one woman with an engagement ring, and later, in Habersham County, he would give another a large wooden key with a sign that read, THIS IS THE KEY TO UNLOCK YOUR HEART, but both relationships came apart. In northern Georgia, Jewell worked nights and became wedded to his job. By his own description, he was methodical. "I am the kind of person who plans everything. I like to go from A to B to C to D. This going from A to D and arguing over everything—I say no." Habersham County, a scenic part of the piney woods in Georgia's Bible Belt, was for Jewell like "leaving the 1990s and going into the 1970s in terms of law enforcement." Many rich Atlantans have country houses in the mountains, but the small towns of Demorest and Charlottesville are relatively undeveloped, reminding one of Jewell's lawyers of the scenery in the movie Deliverance. "If you get lost up there, you might find a guy with a bow and arrow," the lawyer said.Recently, Jewell and I took the 90-minute drive from Atlanta to Habersham County, which has acres of apple orchards. The leaves were turning, and the roads were mostly deserted. In the towns, however, were stores, apple stands, and even a good Chinese restaurant. As Jewell's blue pickup truck turned into the parking lot of a shopping center, several people came out to greet him.Jewell had lived in a small yellow house up a steep rocky driveway. On the day we visited, the current resident's Halloween decorations were still up, as were faded white satin ribbons hanging from many trees, remnants of a campaign to clear Richard Jewell organized by area friends. Jewell had lived 50 yards from the Chattahoochee River near a kayak-and-canoe tourist concession on a main road—not in a "cabin in the woods," as several reports stated after the bombing. He worked the night shift, and when he would arrive home at dawn, he told me, he could look up and "see a sky filled with stars."He was not a loner; he made friends with several local families. He would often leave a box of Dunkin' Donuts on friends' porches at four A.M. During the O. J. Simpson trial, he and the other deputies would meet in the turnaround on Highway 985 in the middle of the night and review the day's events and the bungling by the Los Angeles Police Department. Jewell would later be annoyed that the F.B.I. confiscated his copy of former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's account of the trial. Jewell dated a local girl, Sheree Chastain, and had a close relationship with her family.Jewell had a complex history working at the Habersham County Sheriff's Office. When he was still a jailer, he arrested a couple making too much noise in a hot tub at an apartment building where he did part-time security work. He was arrested for impersonating an officer and, after pleading guilty to a lesser charge, was placed on probation on the condition that he seek psychological counseling.By his own estimation, Jewell's strength as a cop was "working car wrecks." He had his mother's diligence; he worked 14 hours a day and organized a safety fair. Later in 1995 he wrecked his patrol car and was demoted to working in the jail. Rick Moore, a local deputy, advised him to accept the job, but Jewell despised the jailhouse atmosphere. He told me, "It was a small room filled with cigarette smoke. I couldn't take it." He resigned, and in a short time he moved to a police job at Piedmont College, a liberal-arts school with approximately 1,000 students on the main road in Demorest. The college police had jurisdiction only on campus and in an area extending out 500 feet. Jewell chased cars speeding down the highway and had arguments over turf with other officers. He was instrumental in several arrests, including that of a suspected burglar he discovered hiding at the top of a tree. For his work on a volunteer rescue squad, he was named a citizen of the year.According to Brad Mattear, a former resident director, Piedmont was a school of "P.K.'s"—preachers' kids. It was 80 percent Baptist with a strict no-drinking rule. The college had many rebellious students, according to Mattear, kids who were "away from home for the first time and wanted to party and drink." Mattear knew Jewell well and recalled his good manners and playful nature. "It was always 'Yes, sir' and 'Yes, ma'am.'" Jewell would tell students, "I know y'all are going to drink. Don't do it on campus."Jewell felt confined by his boundaries and could be heavy-handed when it came to writing out reports on minor infractions. Once when we were driving by the campus, he pointed to a small brick dormitory. "That was where all the partying would go on," he told me. Jewell would raid dorm rooms and report drinking violations. "I did not hesitate to tell the parents—in no uncertain terms—what their kids were up to," he said.He soon made enemies at the school. "Three or four times a week," Mattear said, Piedmont students were in the office of Ray Cleere, the president of the college, complaining about Jewell and other Piedmont police. After Jewell was admonished for a number of controversial arrests, he resigned.Jewell had an out: his mother was going to have an operation on her foot. He would go home to Atlanta for the Olympics and look for a new job. He called his mother: "Is it all right with you if I stay with you while you have your surgery?" He hoped he might get a job with the Atlanta police or, failing that, work security at the Olympics. "I thought, Working at the Centennial Olympic Park will look really good on my resume."At the age of 33, back in his mother's apartment, he was at first treated like a wayward teenager. Bobi was sharp with him about his slovenly habits, his weight, and his driving. Bobi had carved out a life for herself; she arrived at work by eight A.M. each morning and had many friends. Trim, with short-cropped hair, Bobi Jewell is the kind of woman who labels her clothes and spices and spends much of her spare time baking cakes and babysitting for extra money. She carries on telephone friendships with claim adjusters at other companies. It was somewhat unsettling for her, she told me, to have Richard at home after she had grown used to living with only her dog, Brandi, and her cat, Boots. Bobi was annoyed that he had wrecked a patrol car, and worried about his safety. "Every time he leaves the apartment, I'll say, 'Richard . . . ' And he'll say, 'Yes, ma'am. I know. The person that I am going to see will be there when I get there,'" she said. On one occasion Bobi talked about Richard's return to Atlanta. "What is wrong with trying to revamp your life?" she asked me. Her eyes filled with tears. "Why does everyone in the media think it is so strange?"On Friday, July 26, Bobi Jewell was home waiting for her niece to arrive from Virginia for the Olympic softball competition the following week. In preparation, she had stocked her apartment with food. It was a clear Georgia evening, not as hot as had been expected. As usual, Richard left for the park at 4:45 P.M. and arrived at the AT&T pavilion about 5:30. His stomach was bothering him; he was convinced that he had eaten a bad hamburger the day before. Lin Wood and Wayne Grant had arranged to take their children to Centennial Park that night. The park, in downtown Atlanta, stretches over 21 acres. There were air-conditioned tents, concerts on the stage, and hot-dog and souvenir stands. Downtown Atlanta was usually deserted in the oppressively hot, humid summer, but this year thousands of tourists filled the sidewalks, or sat on benches in the shade of some crape-myrtle trees, or cooled off by a fountain. Tour buses clogged the main arteries, and everyone complained that it took hours to get anywhere; stories were traded about athletes' getting to their competitions late because of the poor planning of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.As always, Jewell was working the 12-hour night shift near the sound-and-light tower by the stage. He was pleased because one of his favorite groups—Jack Mack and the Heart Attack—was going to perform at 12:45. Jewell had a routine: he would check in and fill the ice chest he kept by a bench at his station. Jewell liked to offer water and Cokes to pregnant women or policemen who stopped to rest.After he arrived at the park, his stomach cramps grew worse and he had a bout of diarrhea. At approximately 10 P.M. he took a break to go to the bathroom. The closest one was by the stage, but the security staff was not allowed to use it. "I really have to go," Jewell says he told the stage manager. "And he said, 'Well, O.K. this time.'"When Jewell came out, he noticed that it was "real calm" and there wasn't much wind blowing. At that time of night, the crowd from Bud World became a little more raucous. Jewell was annoyed when he saw a group of drunks near his bench and beer cans littering the area beside the fence nearby. As he went to report the trash and the group that was carousing, he spotted a large olive-green military-style backpack, known as an Alice pack, under the bench. There had been a similar bag found the week before. Jewell later told an F.B.I. agent that he was annoyed that one of the drunks had tried to get into the lens of a camera crew. Jewell had told them to cut it out. "They were running off at the mouth," Jewell would later tell Larry Landers of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (G.B.I.)."I was light about the package at first," he told me, "kidding around with Tom Davis from the G.B.I.: 'Well, are you going to open it?' At that point, it was not a concern. I was thinking to myself, Well, I am sure one of these people left it on the ground. When Davis came back and said, 'Nobody said it was theirs,' that is when the little hairs on the back of my head began to stand up. I thought, Uh-oh. This is not good."I never really had time to be frightened. My law-enforcement background paid off here. What went through my head was like a computer screen of this list I had to do. I had to call my supervisor. I have to tell people in the tower that something was going on. I have to be firm with them, stay calm, and be professional."Almost immediately, Jewell and Tom Davis cleared a 25-foot-square area around the backpack; Jewell made two trips into the tower to warn the technicians. "I want y'all out now. This is serious."Two blocks away on Marietta Street, approximately 300 editors, copywriters, and reporters from Cox newspapers around the country had taken over the extra desks in the new eighth-floor newsroom at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to prepare the special Olympics edition they put out each afternoon. The paper had gone "Olympics-crazy," according to one reporter. The editor, Ron Martin, and the managing editor, John Walter—"WalMart," as they were called—had let it be known that no expense would be spared. Ann Hardie, who normally covers science, had been sent around the world to master the fine points of beach volleyball; Bill Rankin, officially on the federal-court beat, was assigned table tennis. The paper intended to set new standards in its hometown during the games, but in addition there was a hint of redemption in the air.Since Cox newspaper executives had forced the resignation of the distinguished editor Bill Kovach in 1988, the paper had suffered a severe loss of reputation. "We all felt just kind of beaten down," one reporter said. Kovach had been brought to Atlanta from The New York Times to elevate The A.J.C. into being the definitive paper of the New South, but eventually he irritated the local powers. Atlanta was inbred, a city of deals, and he resigned in a blaze of press outrage. Kovach now ran the Nieman journalism-fellowship program at Harvard, and the movie rights to his turbulent years in Atlanta—reported in these pages by Peter J. Boyer—had been sold to Warner Bros.Within the profession, The A.J.C. had become something of a joke. More and more, its emphasis was on what John Walter called "chunklets"—short bits in a soft-news style known as eye-candy. The paper published features on couples massage and how mushrooms grow in the rain. Walter had fired off several terse memos to ensure that there would be no more jumps of news stories to back pages and no more unsourced news stories, except on rare occasions. "I don't see any reason why you can't report hard news in a short form," one editor told me.The A.J. C. style of reporting in declarative sentences had a name, too: the voice of God. It was omniscient, because it allowed no references to unattributed sources. Subjects such as AIDS, which often required confidentiality, could not be covered properly in the paper, in the opinion of several reporters. The A.J.C. picked up news stories with unnamed sources from The New York Times, however, and reporters groused about the hypocrisy of the double standard.On Saturday morning, July 27, Bob Johnson, the night metro editor, left the newsroom at one A.M. The sidewalks were still crowded; Johnson sat on a wall outside waiting for an A.J.C. shuttle bus to pick him up. About 1:25 he heard a strange noise. "It sounded like an aerial bomb at a fireworks show," he said. He recalled thinking, Damn, that is sort of foolish. Then he heard screams and saw people running. Johnson rushed back upstairs to the almost deserted sixth-floor newsroom. Lyda Longa, a night police reporter, was still there. Johnson sent her down to the park and turned on the news, but nothing had moved across the wires. Just after two A.M., Longa called from the park. She told Johnson that one person had been killed and dozens were down—it was absolute chaos. Johnson could hear the sirens and the screams through the telephone; he began to type into his computer. "We were trying to get a bullet into the street edition," Johnson recalled. In the crisis, it took only minutes for reporters to return to the newsroom; several had been at the park when the bomb went off. Rochelle Bozman, an Olympics editor, appeared and took over for Johnson. Soon John Walter was there, as was Bert Roughton, who would assist him in supervising the A.J.C. coverage of the bombing.At the park, Jewell spoke with the first F.B.I. agents to arrive on the scene. The smell and the noise, he remembered, were overwhelming, and sensations blurred together. "It was hard to describe the sound," he said. "It was like what you hear in the movies. It was, like, KABOOM. I had seen an explosion in police training. We had ear protection when it went off. It smelled like a flash-bang grenade. The sky was not filled with black smoke, but grayish-white. All the shrapnel that was inside the package kept flying around, and some of the people got hit from the bench and some with metal."Bobi Jewell had just gone to sleep when the telephone rang. It was Richard. "Mom, they had a bomb go off down here, but I am O.K. regardless of what the TV says." He could hardly speak; he seemed paralyzed. Jewell did not mention to his mother that he had found the backpack and alerted Tom Davis. Bobi was perplexed. "I thought, What does he mean?"All night long she stayed on the foldout sofa watching the news reports. She was frightened by the ambulances, the noise, the bodies in the park.Soon veteran homicide detectives in the Atlanta police arrived at the bomb site. One sergeant was trying to make his way through the crowd when an Olympics official stopped him. "Tell these cops to get the hell out of here," he said, according to a captain in the homicide division. "Well, you get the fuck out of here. Who are you?" the sergeant demanded. Agents from the Atlanta F.B.I. office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were in a shouting match over jurisdiction. "We are handling this!" one said. "No, this is ours!" an F.B.I. agent snapped.In the command center at F.B.I. headquarters in northeastern Atlanta, there was complete pandemonium. The Olympics were a national convention for law enforcement. Some 30,000 security personnel were on hand. Over the next few days, there would be an internal debate: Who was going to be in charge of the bombing investigation? In Atlanta at that time were three veteran investigators with executive experience: Tom Fuentes, who is credited with helping to bring John Gotti to heel; Barry Mawn, who has worked extensively in organized-crime probes; and Robin Montgomery, the head of the critical-incident unit at Quantico, who at Ruby Ridge in 1992 questioned the disastrous "rules of engagement" which led to tragedy.In the early-morning hours, F.B.I. agents picked up several suspects, including one referred to as "the drunk in the bar." According to F.B.I. sources, Louis Freeh himself got on the telephone to Barry Mawn. Freeh, a former F.B.I. agent, was personally monitoring the initial investigation by means of a series of conference calls from the command post at F.B.I. headquarters. He focused on "the drunk in the bar," who had been making threats the night before, and within hours the information was leaked that the F.B.I. had a suspect. From Atlanta, Barry Mawn contacted his superiors in Washington. "This suspect is not the bomber," he reportedly said, according to a former highlevel F.B.I. executive. Freeh allegedly lost his temper and belittled Mawn's professional abilities. He is said to have told Mawn that he "had handled this all wrong." The words one hears characterizing Freeh's telephone calls to the agents on duty in Atlanta are "abusive," "condescending," and "dismissive." A story went around the command center that Freeh was already saying, "We have our man," according to a source in the bureau.Watson Bryant was thinking, I cannot believe that I know anyone who throws pipe bombs into gopher holes.Freeh made a decision: however experienced Montgomery, Fuentes, and Mawn were, this investigation would be run by Division 5 of the F.B.I., the National Security Division, a former counterintelligence unit that has been looking for a purpose since the Cold War ended. Trained in observation, division members rarely made a criminal case—their strength was intimidation and manipulation rather than the deliberate gathering of evidence to be presented in court. The F.B.I. promptly declared the bombing a terrorism case and placed it under the authority of Bob Bryant, head of the division. David Tubbs of Division 5 was sent to Atlanta to be the spokesman and to augment Woody Johnson, the Atlanta special agent in charge (S.A.C.), who had been trained in hostage rescue and who was awkward in press briefings. Tubbs was not as experienced in criminal cases as Mawn or Montgomery, who returned to Newark and Quantico, respectively, "to get out of the line of fire," according to numerous F.B.I. sources. But Bryant and Freeh were reportedly micromanaging the S.A.C.'s and, later, the case agents Don Johnson and Diader Rosario.106107 VIEW ARTICLE PAGESOn the morning of the bombing, Watson Bryant's alarm went off at six A.M. He was going to the Olympic kayak competition on the Ocoee River with Andy Currie, a friend from his Vanderbilt University days. He learned of the bombing on the radio as he was getting ready to go to Currie's house. "Whoever has done this should be skinned alive," he told Currie. He spent the day in the country, and on Sunday he went out to run errands. When he got home, there was a message on his answering machine: "Watson, this is Richard Jewell. You may have heard that I found the bomb and people are calling me a hero. Somebody told me I might get a book contract." It had been years since Bryant had spoken to Jewell, but he did not immediately return the call; he was busy finishing up some contracts so that he could take a few days off to enjoy the Olympics.In addition, Bryant was annoyed with Jewell. After Bryant had befriended him in their days at the Small Business Administration, Jewell had borrowed his new, $250 radar detector and never returned it. He had promised to pay him $100 for it, but he never had. In the meantime, Bryant's life had changed; he had set up an office as a solo practitioner. Bryant despised corporate politics and had no gift for them. His penchant for taking on pro-bono work for friends annoyed his wife, however. Bryant believed that Richard Jewell had attached himself to him years earlier because he lacked a father, but nevertheless Jewell could get on his nerves. By the summer of 1996, Bryant was preoccupied; his marriage had come apart two years earlier, and he was trying to sort out his life.When he finally returned Jewell's phone call, he said, "Well, damn it, where's my $100?" Jewell laughed uneasily and told him about discovering the green backpack that contained the bomb. "Didn't you see me on the news?" Bryant reminded him that he rarely watched TV. "I am proud of you, Richard," he said. "About this book contract, I think it's far-fetched, but don't sign anything unless I see it first."In the Newsweek cover story detailing the bombing, published Monday, July 29, there was no mention of Richard Jewell. It said only that "a security guard" had alerted Tom Davis of the G.B.I. that no one had claimed the backpack under his bench. By the time Newsweek was on the stands, however, Jewell had been interviewed on CNN. The AT&T publicity department had booked him on TV and told him to wear the shirt with the AT&T logo. Jewell reluctantly agreed. "The idea of going on TV made me nervous," he told me. "I was not the hero. There were so many others who saved lives."In Demorest, Ray Cleere, the president of Piedmont College, was home on Saturday, July 27, watching CNN. Cleere had at one time been Mississippi's commissioner of higher education, but he was now posted at the rural Baptist mountain school. He was said to feel that he had suffered a loss of status in the boondocks, where he was out of the academic mainstream. He called Dick Martin, his chief of campus police. Shouldn't they call the F.B.I. and tell them about Richard Jewell? he asked. Cleere had had a strong disagreement with Jewell when one of the students was caught smoking pot. Jewell wanted to arrest him; Cleere said no. Cleere, Brad Mattear recalled, "worried constantly about the image of the college." According to Mattear, "Cleere loved the limelight. He wanted public attention"—the very trait he reportedly ascribed to Richard Jewell.Dick Martin, who was fond of Jewell, suggested a compromise, according to Lin Wood: he would call a friend in the G.B.I. Cleere then called the F.B.I. hot line in Washington himself. Wood says Cleere later complained that no one had seemed to want to listen to what he had to say about Richard Jewell. But his telephone call would trigger a complex set of circumstances in Habersham County, where F.B.I. investigators fanned out over the hills, attempting to uncover evidence that could lead to Jewell's arrest. "The F.B.I. took his word, and what it actually did was get them both in a bunch of trouble," Mattear said. (Cleere has declined to comment.)For Richard Jewell, Tuesday, July 30, would become a haze in which his life was turned upside down. "The hours of the day ran so fast it is hard to remember what all happened," he told me. He started the day early at the Atlanta studio of the Today show. He was tired; the evening before he had had his friend Tim Attaway, a G.B.I. agent, for dinner. He had made lasagna and had drawn Attaway a diagram of the sound-and-light tower. Jewell had talked into the night about the bombing; only later would he learn that Attaway was wearing a wire.Despite the late evening, Jewell was excited at the thought of meeting Katie Couric and being interviewed about finding the Alice pack in the park. His mother asked him to try to get Tom Brokaw's autograph. "He was a man my mom respected a great deal," he said.When he got back to the apartment, he was surprised to see a cluster of reporters in the parking lot. "Do you think you are a suspect?" one asked. Jewell laughed. "I know they'll investigate anyone who was at the park that night," he said. "That includes you-all too." Jewell did not turn on the TV, but he noticed that the group outside the door continued to grow. At four that afternoon, Jewell received a phone call from Anthony Davis, the head of the security company Jewell worked for at AT&T. "Have you seen the news?" Davis asked. "They are saying you are a suspect." Jewell said, "They are talking to everybody." According to Jewell, Davis said, "They are zeroing in on you. To keep the publicity down, don't go to work."Within minutes, Don Johnson and Diader Rosario knocked on Jewell's door. They exuded sincerity, Jewell recalled. "They told me they wanted me to come with them to headquarters to help them make a training film to be used at Quantico," he said. Johnson played to Jewell's pride. Despite the reporters in the parking lot and the call from Anthony Davis, Jewell had no doubt that they were telling the truth. He drove the short distance to F.B.I. headquarters in Buckhead in his own truck, but he noticed that four cars were following him. "The press is on us," Jewell told Johnson when they arrived. "No, those are our guys," Johnson told him. This tactic would continue through the next 88 days and be severely criticized: Why would you have an armada of surveillance vehicles stacked up on a suspected bomber?It was then that Jewell started to wonder why he was at the F.B.I., but he followed Johnson and Rosario inside. Rosario was known for his skills as a negotiator; he had once helped calm a riot of Cuban prisoners in Atlanta. Johnson, however, had a reputation for overreaching. In Albany, New York, in 1987, he had pursued an investigation of then mayor Thomas Whalen. According to Whalen, the local U.S. attorney found no evidence to support Johnson's assertions and issued a letter to Whalen exonerating him completely, but Whalen believed it cost him an appointment as a federal judge.As Jewell sat in a small office, he wondered why the cameraman recording the interview was staring at him so intently. After an hour, Johnson was called out of the room. When he returned, he said to Jewell, "Let's pretend that none of this happened. You are going to come in and start over, and by the way, we want you to fill out this waiver of rights.""At that moment a million things were going through my head," Jewell told me. "You don't give anyone a waiver of rights unless they are being investigated. I said, 'I need to contact my attorney,' and then all of a sudden it was an instant change. 'What do you need to contact your attorney for? You didn't do anything. We thought you were a hero. Is there something you want to tell us about?'" Jewell grew increasingly apprehensive and later recalled thinking, These guys think I did this.When the agents took a break, Jewell asked to use the phone. "I called Watson four times. I called his brother. I told his parents that I had to get hold of Watson—it was urgent. I was, like, 'I have to speak to him right now.' What was going on was that Washington was on the phone with Atlanta. The people in Washington were giving them questions." Jewell said he knew this because the videotapes in the cameras were two hours long and "Johnson and Rosario would leave every 30 minutes, like they had to speak on the phone." The O.RR. report, however, would assert that no one at headquarters knew about the videotaping or the training-film ruse. Lying to get a statement out of a suspect is, in fact, not illegal, but clearly Johnson and Rosario were not making decisions on their own. Even the procedure of having a fleet of cars follow a suspect was an intimidation tactic used by the F.B.I. Later, according to Jewell, Johnson and Rosario would both tell him privately that they believed he was innocent, but that the investigation was being run by the "highest levels in Washington."Within the bureau, the belief is that during one of the telephone calls Freeh instructed Johnson and Rosario to read Jewell his Miranda rights. Freeh is said to have learned of Johnson's history from a member of his security detail, who had worked in Atlanta. He told Freeh that "Johnson had a reputation for being obnoxious and a problem." In addition, a week after Jewell's interview, Freeh reportedly received a call from Janet Reno, who had learned about the ruse from Kent Alexander, the local U.S. attorney, and Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. Freeh wondered aloud how it was that, of all the agents in Atlanta, Johnson had been selected to work on the Jewell case. Like Jewell, Johnson had wound up in Atlanta because of his overzealous behavior—according to an F.B.I. source, the Whalen episode had resulted in a "loss-of-effectiveness transfer," an F.B.I. euphemism. (Johnson declined to respond.)On that same Tuesday, Watson Bryant and Nadya Light closed the office early and went to Centennial Park. Light, 35, a pretty Russian immigrant, had never met Radar, Bryant's old friend, and wanted to buy him a celebratory meal. Killing time until Jewell came on duty, they went into the House of Blues and then bought some hot sauce. Walking toward his car, Bryant saw newsboys hawking the afternoon edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "It was like out of a cartoon. They were all yelling!" he recalled. "I caught the headline out of the corner of my eye." The headline read: FBI SUSPECTS 'HERO' GUARD MAY HAVE PLANTED BOMB.Bryant borrowed 50 cents from Light to buy the paper and began to read: '"Richard Jewell, 33 . . . fits the profile of the lone bomber.' I could not believe it."At that moment, Bryant's brother, Bruce, who was on his way to the diving competition, got a call from Jewell. "Where is Watson?" As Bruce Bryant walked past a Speedo billboard with a TV screen, he saw Richard Jewell's face filling the screen. "Oh, my God," he said to his wife. At the same moment, Watson was in his car a block away on Northside Drive when he too noticed the Speedo screen. He could not get back to his house—the streets were blocked off for the cycling competition. From his car he called F.B.I. headquarters and demanded to speak to Jewell. "He is not here," the operator said. From his home phone, he picked up his messages and heard Jewell's low, urgent tones. "He didn't leave a number," Bryant told Light. "Call Star 69," she said. The number came back: 679-9000, the number for F.B.I. headquarters, which he had just dialed. Within minutes, Bryant had Jewell on the phone. Jewell told him he was making a training film. "You idiot! You are a suspect. Get your ass out of there now!" Bryant told him.Before The Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke the story of Richard Jewell, there had been a debate in the newsroom over whether or not to name him. One block away, CNN's Art Harris and Henry Schuster had alerted the network's president that Jewell was targeted, but they held the story, because they understood its potential magnitude. At The A.J.C., Kathy Scruggs, a police reporter, who had allegedly gotten a tip from a close friend in the F.B.I., got a confirmation from someone in the Atlanta police. According to the managing editor, John Walter, the first edition of the paper that Tuesday had a brief profile of Jewell. It was dropped in later editions as Walter questioned whether the paper had enough facts to support the scoop. Because of the voice-of-God style, the paper ended up making a flat-out statement: "Richard Jewell . . . fits the profile of the lone bomber."When I asked John Walter about the lone-bomber sentence, he said, "I ultimately edited it. . . . One of the tests we put to the material is, is it a verifiable fact?" One editor added, "The whole story is voice-of-God. . . . Because we see this event taking place, the need to attribute it to sources—F.B.I. or law enforcement—is less than if there is no public acknowledgment." John Walter indicated that he had not seen a lone-bomber profile. I asked him, "Whose profile of a lone bomber does Richard Jewell fit? Where is the 'says who' in this sentence?" Walter said that he felt comfortable with the assertion.The page-one story had a double byline: Kathy Scruggs and Ron Martz. Walter had told these two early on that they would be the reporters assigned to any Olympic catastrophe. Martz, who had covered the Gulf War, had been assigned the security beat for the Olympics; Scruggs routinely covered local crime. Scruggs had good contacts in the Atlanta police, and she was tough. She was characterized as "a police groupie" by one former staff member. "Kathy has a hard edge that some people find offensive," one of her editors told me, but he praised her skills. Police reporters are often "dictation pads" for local law enforcement; recently the American Journalism Review sharply criticized The A.J. C. for the scanty confirmation and lack of skepticism in its coverage of Jewell.The newsroom atmosphere resembled that at F.B.I. headquarters; there was a frenzy to be first. Kent Walker, a newsroom intern, published a story in the same edition, with a glaring mistake in the headline: BOMB SUSPECT HAD SOUGHT LIMELIGHT, PRESS INTERVIEWS. Since Ray Cleere's tip to the F.B.I., the "hero bomber" theory had been circulating among Atlanta law enforcement officers. Maria Elena Fernandez, a reporter, was sent to Habersham County on July 29. By coincidence, William Rathburn, the head of security for the Olympics, had been at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 when a fake bomb was found on a bus—left by a policeman who sought attention.On the surface, the story had an irresistible newsroom logic: Jewell was clearly looking for recognition. Bert Roughton, the city editor, had answered the telephone when a representative from AT&T called to ask if the paper would like a Jewell interview. According to Walter, Roughton himself typed a sentence in the Scruggs-and-Martz piece: "He [Jewell] also has approached newspapers, including The Atlanta JournalConstitution, seeking publicity for his actions." But he hadn't. Walter explained, "There was nothing wrong with that sentence. That's journalistically proper. It is not common practice, to my knowledge, to ask someone you are interviewing . . . 'Are you here of your own free will?'" Jewell had not contacted the paper—a fact which would have been easy enough to check. Walter became snappish when I described the sentence as "a mistake." "It was not a mistake," he said angrily. Scruggs and Martz quoted Piedmont College president Ray Cleere as backup. According to Cleere, Jewell had been "a little erratic" and "almost too excitable."There was no doubt raised by The A.J.C. about the value of Cleere's information or the fragility of the F.B.I.'s potential case. On Tuesday morning, July 30, Christina Headrick, a young intern on the paper, was sent to Buford Highway to stake out Richard Jewell's apartment. She phoned in that there were men doing surveillance. By deadline, John Walter had made a decision: he would tear up the afternoon Olympics edition and lead with Jewell.Several states away, Colonel Robert Ressler was watching CNN when the A.J.C. extra edition was shown. Ressler, who was retired from the behavioral-science unit of the F.B.I., had, along with John Douglas, developed the concept of criminal-personality profiling. He was the co-author of the Crime Classification Manual, which is used by the F.B.I. He had interviewed Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy, and as he watched the TV report, he was mystified. "They were talking about an F.B.I. profile of a hero bomber, and I thought, What F.B.I. profile? It rather surprised me." According to Ressler, the definition of "hero homicide"—a person looking for recognition without an intent to kill— perhaps emerged as "hero bomber." "There is no such classification as the hero bomber," he told me recently. "This was a myth." Later he said, "It occurred to me that there was no database of any bomber who lived with his mother, was a security guard and unmarried. How many hero bombers had we ever encountered? Only one that I know of, in Los Angeles, and his bomb did not go off." Ressler knew that something was off; profiles are developed from a complex set of evidence and facts derived only in part from a crime scene. The bomb had been deadly, which was not consistent with the "hero complex." Furthermore, he wondered, where did they get the information to put the profile together that fast? He asked himself, What came first here, the chicken or the egg? Was the so-called profile actually developed from the circumstances, or was it invented for Richard Jewell?When Jewell returned home from F.B.I. headquarters just before eight P.M., NBC was showing special Olympic coverage. He sat on the sofa and watched Tom Brokaw say, "They probably have enough to arrest him right now, probably enough to prosecute him, but you always want to have enough to convict him as well. There are still holes in this case."Jewell knew that Brokaw was his mother's favorite newsman; he looked at her and noticed "the color and the blood flow out of her face when she heard that." Bobi turned to him and asked, "What is he talking about?" Jewell later recalled, "Brokaw was talking about her son as a murderer. . . . She started crying, and what am I going to say to her? 'Mom, Watson is going to fix this'? What do you say? She doesn't hear anything anyway—she was in hysterics." At that point, Jewell said, he broke down as well.The day Watson Bryant inadvertently became the lead lawyer for Richard Jewell, he was an attorney whom almost no one in the Atlanta legal establishment had ever heard of. "Who the hell is Watson Bryant?" a caption in the daily legal sheet, the Fulton County Daily Report, would read after he had appeared on the Today show. Bryant understood Jewell's vulnerability and decided on a strategy: he would treat him as a member of his own family. In Atlanta, the Bryants were a clan: Watson's father, Goble Bryant, had been a West Point tackle, on the 1949 college all-star team; his grandfather had invented a process for putting handles on paper bags. Watson had partied through Vanderbilt University and had barely gotten accepted to law school at the University of South Carolina. He had a close relationship with his brother, Bruce, and their sister, Barbara Ann, and if he lacked staff at his office, he knew he could count on his family to pick up the slack. Bruce enlisted Jewell to help coach his junior football team; Watson had a picnic for Richard and Bobi at his parents' house at the Atlanta Country Club.When Bryant arrived at the Jewells' apartment that night, he pushed his way through the crowd standing outside in the spongy Atlanta humidity. Microphones were shoved in his face. "What is happening, Watson?" Bobi asked him. Bryant asked Jewell to speak to him alone. "I want to know if you can tell me, without any hesitation at all, if you had anything to do with the bombing," he said. "I didn't," Jewell told him. "I said, 'I am going to ask you again.' He would not look me in the eye. I said, 'Don't give me this "sir" shit.' I said, 'Richard, these people want to kill you. I cannot help you unless you tell me the absolute, unequivocal truth.' I was in his face. He said he did not have anything to do with it." Jewell was bewildered and numb, said Bryant, who left at 10:30 P.M. At midnight, Jewell called him to say, "They are massing outside the apartment, Watson."The next morning, Bryant went from talk show to talk show, starting with NBC. With the notable exception of The New York Times, virtually every newspaper in the country had picked up the A.J.C. story and run it as front-page news. There were 10,000 reporters in Atlanta; the Los Angeles Times would later call the squad bearing down on the Jewells "a massive strike force . . . Tora! Tora! Tora!" Bryant was in a daze, but he held his own. "Is it true that Jewell was at some time ordered to seek psychological counseling?" Bryant Gumbel asked him. "I know a lot of people that ought to have psychological counseling," Watson Bryant replied.By 10 A.M. he was back at the Jewells' apartment, studying a search warrant that had been delivered that day. The F.B.I., Jewell recalled, said that he could not be inside the apartment during the search. Bryant called F.B.I. headquarters: "What the hell is this? Why can't he be there?" Within an hour, at least 40 members of the F.B.I. had arrived, with dogs. "There was a physical-evidence team. There was a scientific team. There was a team for the bomb-squad people, and then the A.T.F. . . . They all had different-color shirts. Light blue for bombs, dark blue for evidence protection, red and yellow." Bryant could not believe what he was seeing. "This is like damn Six Flags over Georgia," he told them."I kept saying to Watson, 'I didn't do this.' And he said, 'Hey, kid, I believe you—we are doing what we can.'" Jewell was a gun collector. Bryant was sharp with him: "You get all those guns out of your closets and put them on your bed. We don't want any trouble."For seven hours, Jewell sat outside on the staircase in what has become one of the most famous images of last summer. Bryant had to take his daughter, Meredith, to the Olympic equestrian competition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her. As he left, he said, "Don't do anything stupid. Just shut up and let them do what they have to do." Hours passed as Jewell sat in the heat. "Finally I decided I would ask them if I could go in and use the rest room. They said, 'We got the order a couple of hours ago you could come in; you just can't get in our way.'" Jewell was told he had to wear rubber socks and gloves in order not to contaminate the site. The Jewell apartment is small—two bedrooms with a bathroom in between, a living room, an alcove dining room that has been turned into a den. As Jewell sat on the sofa, he thought he heard a crash in his bedroom. "I thought my CD player was on the floor, and I said, 'What are you-all tearing up?' and they said, 'You can't go in there right now; we are searching.' I said, 'I want to know what you-all just broke.'" One search warrant listed some 200 items the F.B.I. could confiscate, including "magazines, books . . . and photographs which would include descriptive information such as telephone numbers, addresses, affiliations and contact points of individuals involved in a conspiracy to manufacture, transport and . . . detonate . . . the explosive device used in the bombing at the Olympic Centennial Park on July 27, 1996.""They had all my pictures, all the stuff that was in the drawers. My personal things. How would you like to know that 12 different guys had been in your underwear, laid it out on the floor, probably walked on it and then folded it back up like nothing ever happened and put it in your drawer? So then Mom got to go and watch it on TV: 'Live from the Jewell house, the search continues. . . . We are expecting an arrest any minute.'"When Bobi Jewell returned home, the apartment appeared neat, until she walked into her kitchen. She looked down at her counters, where all her condiments, dog biscuits, spices, and crackers had been taken out of their Tupperware containers and placed in Ziploc bags. She began to cry. And then she went into the bedroom and "immediately started washing clothes," Jewell said.Driving home from the equestrian events, Bryant heard the live coverage of the search on the radio. "Why are you helping this guy if he's guilty?" Meredith asked.The next morning, Bryant received a copy of the F.B.I. inventory of articles confiscated in the apartment. On the list he was stunned to see "one hollowed-out hand grenade, ball-shaped" and "one hollowed-out hand grenade, pinecone-shaped." "What the hell is this?" he asked Jewell. "They were paperweights," Jewell said. "I bought them at a military store." "Oh, shit," Bryant said.For the first few days, the Jewells lived on ham omelettes; a neighbor had brought them half a ham from the Honey Baked Ham Company on Buford Highway. Bobi Jewell had a vacation scheduled, so she remained at home, lying on the bed and "listening to the ball game if it was on." For two weeks, she cleaned out her bureau drawers. Richard would spend the day watching CNN or movies such as Backdraft and Midnight Run. "I would look out the window and see about 150 to 200 press people. Then it would drop to five or six on the hill. They had one person sitting up there at all times with their binoculars." Richard believed they were being monitored. "They heard everything that was going on. They were over there with high-intensity zoom lenses. They had people over there who could read lips. They had a sound dish. They could hear everything that we said. They had a person writing down everything we said. I saw them."When Bobi walked out the door, Jewell said, they would holler obscenities and yell, 'You should both die'Once, Bobi's cat jumped on the window ledge under the curtain and the photographers began frenetically shooting pictures, believing that one of the Jewells was in the window. Sound trucks and boom microphones prevented the neighbors from getting near the apartment. Three F.B.I. agents were usually sitting near the tiny swimming pool; each time Jewell or his mother left the house, a cavalcade of unmarked cars would follow. Richard soon began to write a speech describing the horror he felt at being falsely accused. He ate grilled-cheese sandwiches, huge pans of lasagna, and can after can of Campbell's tomato soup."If my mom and I had something we wanted to talk about that we didn't want anyone to hear, we wrote it on pieces of paper. When she left to go to work the next day, she would take it with her, tear it up, and put it in the trash! That is how I kept my mother informed about what was going on with the case." The notes were specific: "What the Justice Department was saying, what my attorneys were hearing through the grapevine that I could tell my mom that was not privileged. It was mainly stuff like 'Keep the faith' and 'Can I borrow $10 for gas in the truck?' "Jewell described how, when his mother would walk out the door, "they would holler obscenities at her. They would yell, 'Did he do it? Did he blow those people up?' They would yell, 'You should both die.'" According to Jewell, "The cameramen were just trying to get us aggravated so they could get it on camera. You don't know how hard it is when they are saying stuff about my mother and me. . . . All she was trying to do was walk her dog. And she cannot do that without hearing that yelling. When someone did that to my mother, I would want to be up on the hill calling the police, because I would want them arrested. I was going to say, 'Mom, tell me which one said that!' And I was going to walk up to that person and introduce myself and say, 'Hi, my name is Richard Jewell. What is yours? Who do you work for? Who is your supervisor?' And I was going to go home and call 911 to get a warrant."By disposition, Jewell is a night person, but he would get up early when his mother went back to work and make her breakfast. By 11 A.M. he would be playing Mortal Kombat II and listening to 96 Rock on the radio, where one of his friends is a disc jockey. Four days into his period of captivity, he called the DeKalb County police. He recalled telling a Mr. Brown, "'This is Richard Jewell. I am sure you are aware of my situation over on Buford Highway.' He said, 'Yes, Richard, I know.' I said, 'I just want to tell you my situation. Number one: I did not do this. Number two: I am here and I am not leaving the apartment for any reason at all.' I said that all the press was doing right now was aggravating my mother and disturbing my neighbors, and I would really appreciate it if the neighbors could return to a normal life."On Saturday, August 3, as Bryant stared at the F.B.I. agent plucking Jewell's hair, he had already made a decision. "It was, like, screw it. I had had it." The next day was the closing ceremony of the Olympics; Bryant imagined that that would be the day the government might choose to arrest Jewell. "Who is the best criminal lawyer in Georgia?" he asked a state lawyers' association. Within a day, he had brought in Jack Martin, an expert on the federal death penalty and a Harvard law school graduate with close ties to the local U.S. attorney, Kent Alexander. "Let me tell you something about myself," Jewell told him in their first meeting. "I hate criminal lawyers." "Well, Richard," Martin said, "I don't much like cops, but sometimes I need one, and this is a time you sure need a criminal lawyer."That weekend, watching the Olympic basketball finals, Bryant had an idea: he wanted to be prepared with his own polygraph test of Jewell if the F.B.I. arrested him. From the game, Bryant called a close friend who was a former federal prosecutor. "Try Richard Rackleff," he said. "We worked together on the Walter Moody bombing case." Rackleff had recently set up a private practice, and he agreed to test Jewell the next day. On Sunday morning, Bryant was up early, unable to sleep. He drove around town, making calls from his cell phone. He dialed 679-9000—the F.B.I. "This is Watson Bryant. I am going to pick up Richard Jewell. I just want you to know that. I don't have a white Bronco. I don't have a wig, and I don't have cash in my car. We are just going to my office."Watson had coordinated an elaborate plan with his brother to dodge reporters; he would use a decoy and snake through a parking garage. Rackleff had been instructed to park blocks from Bryant's office, because his car could be identified easily, since he was well known in Atlanta law enforcement.When Rackleff sat down with Richard Jewell in the conference room, he later told me, he sensed almost immediately that Jewell was innocent. Rackleff had tested many bombers before, including Walter Moody, who was convicted of killing a federal judge. "They are strange ducks—they leave their attorneys cold," Rackleff said. Although no one knew Rackleff was in the building, more than 100 reporters gathered outside to get a look at Jewell. Inside, Jack Martin, Bryant, Nadya Light, and Jewell spent 12 hours in Bryant's office. Rackleff asked Jewell a series of questions, but the test was inconclusive. "Richard is tormented. He is exploding on the inside," Rackleff said. While he was testing him, CNN's Art Harris was visible through the window of Bryant's office, but he could not see inside. Bryant was thoroughly deflated, close to despair. "You have got to try to buck Richard up," Rackleff told him. "Who is going to buck me up?" Bryant asked.'We are not in missile range of arresting Richard Jewell, but we want him to take our own polygraph," Kent Alexander told Bryant and Jack Martin in their first meeting on the case. In the meantime, Rackleff had tested Jewell again, and he had passed with "no deception," the highest rating. By this time, it was clear that there was no damning evidence against Jewell discovered at the apartment or in his old house in Habersham County.Alexander was only 38, but he had been groomed for politics in a fancy local family. His father was a senior partner in a good Atlanta law firm, and he had worked as an intern for Senator Sam Nunn. Bryant worried about Alexander's lack of experience, but Alexander told colleagues that he was disturbed by the lack of substantial evidence against Jewell. He was trying to operate with decency, but he was cautious and had to check every detail with Washington.Bryant, however, didn't trust Alexander; he had had a bad experience with Alexander's predecessor. In 1990, Bryant had almost been put out of business in a tussle with the then U.S. attorney. The local Small Business Administration accused a bank Bryant represented of improper use of funds; the bank blamed Bryant, who was brought before a grand jury and over the next two years almost lost his practice. He spent $50,000 defending himself, and Nadya Light had to take another job, but eventually the case was settled with Bryant's agreeing not to do business with the S.B.A. for 18 months. Bryant had always felt that he had been manhandled by the office. "I learned everything I needed to know about dealing with this office in 1990," Bryant recalled telling Alexander. "No polygraph for Richard."At the meeting, Alexander told Bryant and Martin, "This is all off-the-record. This is a request that is strictly confidential." Weeks later, Louis Freeh came to town to address a breakfast of former F.B.I. agents. Almost immediately, the polygraph request was reported on CNN. "Kent, I thought we had an agreement," Bryant told him. "I cannot control Washington," Alexander said.When two of the bomb-blast victims sued Richard Jewell, Bryant brought in Wood and Grant to handle the civil litigation. Martin opposed the move. He believed in the cone of silence: "Circle the wagons and don't speak." He said that Wood and Grant had a different perspective: Attack, attack, and if you give any quarter, it is a sign of weakness. Martin had been reassured in private by Kent Alexander that Jewell was not in any immediate danger of being arrested, but the team disagreed about press tactics. Martin worked through the Atlanta-establishment back channels; Lin Wood was a rhetoric man. He favored "one big newsbreak a week." "You know who wrote the book Masters of Deceit? J. Edgar Hoover! And that was about the Communist Party in America. So now they have gone from masters of investigation to masters of deceit!" he would routinely tell reporters who called.Three days after Wood and Grant surfaced as the two new civil lawyers, a Ford van with a tinted bubble-shaped window appeared on the top level of the Macy's parking garage which faced the conference-room windows of their offices. According to Wood, the van did not move for 10 days. "We used to sit there and wave at it." Then the lawyers placed a camera in the window, and the next day the vehicle was gone. "For sure that van had laser sound-detecting equipment," Wood said.Jewell was annoyed that press descriptions of him always emphasized his "overzealousness"; he considers himself a man of details. Often, when he's watching movies at home, he freeze-frames in order to study props in scenes. The second weekend he was considered a suspect, he told me, "I walked in and I noticed white powder all over the telephone table in the conference room." It was a Saturday morning, and Jewell had been with his lawyers until late the night before. He told me he was convinced that the F.B.I. "had lifted a ceiling tile," and that the white powder was "dust that came down." Bryant and Jewell made light of it and did not sweep their phones, believing that any tap the F.B.I. would use would be of a laser or satellite variety and impossible to trace. "In the beginning of every conversation, Watson would curse for about a minute and tell them what lowlives they were. And then he would say, 'By the way, this is Richard's lawyer. Y'all can cut your tape players off,"' Jewell said. "I would call them dirty scumbags," said Bryant. But the local U.S. attorney, Kent Alexander, insisted that their phones were not tapped. "There are no wiretap warrants," he said.The F.B.I. did turn up one bit of potentially troublesome evidence in the Jewells' apartment—fragments of a fence that had been blown up in the explosion. After a telephone conversation with Watson Bryant, Kathy Scruggs quoted him saying, "Yes, he did have a sample of the blown-up bomb." Bryant accused her of egregiously misquoting him. He remembered saying to her, "Yes, Richard had souvenirs of the bombing." Scruggs had not taped their conversation. "She cut the 'ing' off of 'bomb,'" Bryant later told me, but Scruggs strongly denies this. The day the story broke, Bryant criticized Scruggs on local radio. That afternoon she appeared at his office to attempt to clear up the misunderstanding. "I don't like your reporting," Bryant recalled telling her. "I'm human, too," she said. The next day, Ron Martz inserted a quote from Bryant in an unrelated news story: "Oh, man, it's not even a scrap of the bomb—it's a piece of damned fence, for God's sake." But the quote would have little impact. Scruggs's version had been picked up; gathering force, it was eventually related by Bill Press on Crossfire on the evening of October 28: "The guy was seen with a homemade bomb at his home a few days before." (The next day CNN would be forced to apologize for the mistake.)By this time Bryant had grown enraged by the media coverage. The New York Post had called Jewell "a Village Rambo" and "a fat, failed former sheriff's deputy." Jay Leno had said that Jewell "had a scary resemblance to the guy who whacked Nancy Kerrigan," and asked, "What is it about the Olympic Games that brings out big fat stupid guys?" The A.J. C. s star columnist, Dave Kindred, had compared Jewell to serial murderer Wayne Williams: "Like this one, that suspect was drawn to the blue lights and sirens of police work. Like this one, he became famous in the aftermath of murder."Television journalism was also a revelation to Bryant; he felt he had "landed on Mars," and spent hours channel-surfing. On CNN, one criminologist said "it was possible" that Jewell had a hero complex. Bryant told his brother, Bruce, "I know I am going to sue someone. I just don't know who." Bruce Bryant searched for Jewell's name on the Internet three weeks into his ordeal and found 10,000 stories. The tone many of the journalists took was accusatory and pre-determined, with a few rare exceptions, such as that of CBS correspondent Jim Stewart. "Don't jump to any conclusion yet," he said sharply in a broadcast at the height of the frenzy.In his first week as Jewell's lawyer, Bryant went to the CNN studio to be interviewed by Larry King. After the broadcast, he was asked to stop in at the office of CNN president Tom Johnson. "They wanted to know what I thought of their reporting so far." Art Harris was in the room. "I turned around and I said to Art Harris, 'Who the hell are you and the rest of the media to make fun of how Richard Jewell and his mother live? Who are you to make fun of working people who live in a $470-a-month apartment? Is there something wrong with that? Who are you to say that he is a weirdo because he lives with his mother?' "According to Jack Martin, the F.B.I. spent weeks on one erroneous early theory—that Richard Jewell was an enraged homosexual cop-hater who had been aided in the bombing by his lover. Jewell had purportedly planted the bomb; the lover then made the 911 phone call warning that it would go off in Centennial Park. The rationale behind this idea was that Jewell was "mad at the cops and wanted to kill other cops," Martin told me.The rumor began at Piedmont College, perhaps invented by several of the students Jewell had turned in for smoking pot, but it had a chilling consequence. In mid-August, three agents appeared at the Curtis Mathes video store in Cornelia, where Chris Simmons, a senior at Piedmont, worked part-time. Simmons, a friend of Jewell's, who was engaged to be married, was a B student, but he displayed the same porcine blankness as Jewell and spoke in a slow drawl. He had a deep distrust of the government and carried a card in his pocket that read: CHRISTOPHER DWAYNE SIMMONS-CAMPAIGN SUPPORT FOR CONSERVATIVE CANDIDATES.The agents questioned Simmons in the store for one and a half hours. "They asked me if I was a homosexual. They asked me if I had accessed the Internet. . . . They later wanted to wire me. They said, 'If he is really a hero, we will find out, and if not, he has killed someone and injured a lot of people.' " Simmons was short with the agents and denied everything. They accused him of lying and said they could take him to Atlanta. The agents told someone Simmons had once worked with that Simmons might be involved in the bombing. "They kept wording questions differently. They kept saying: Do you think Richard Jewell could have done this if he believed that he could get people out in time and nobody would get hurt?" Simmons later called one of the F.B.I. agents and said, "I hear you don't believe my story." He recalled their conversation: " 'I think you are sugarcoating your answers,' he said. I said, 'Next time I talk with you, it will be with a lawyer.' And he asked me if I was threatening him. Then he hung up on me." Ultimately, Simmons volunteered to take a polygraph, which he says he passed. "I was a nervous wreck," he said. "I had only seen this on TV."What was not known outside a small circle of investigators was how deadly the Centennial Park bomb really was. It was well constructed, with a piece of metal shaped like a V, and inside, it had canisters filled with nails and screws. Jack Martin, who had spent time in Vietnam, compared its construction to that of a claymore mine, a sophisticated and lethal device. The bomb weighed more than 40 pounds. It was "a shaped charge," F.B.I. deputy director Weldon Kennedy would announce in December. It could blast out fragments from three separate canisters, but only one of the canisters exploded on July 27. Someone had moved the Alice pack slightly before the bomb detonated, causing most of the shrapnel to shoot into the sky. The composition of the bomb did not suggest the work of an amateur, Kathy Scruggs would ironically later report, after interviewing an A.T.F. chemist.As the weeks went by, Richard Jewell withdrew into a state of psychological limbo; he began to try to analyze what the agents might think of his behavior within the small apartment. "I would be watching a spy show on TV or something like a John Wayne movie. Someone would be talking about blowing something up, and I would think to myself, My God, that is going to sound really bad if they think I am listening to that." He worried that "they would think I was some kind of a nut," and often, when he could not sleep, he would find himself consciously switching to exercise videos and soap operas.Over Labor Day weekend, he drove up to Habersham County for a picnic with his ex-girlfriend's family, the Chastains. As usual, three F.B.I. cars followed him, but he had gotten adept at picking out the unmarked vehicles. As Jewell drove into town, he noticed that white ribbons hung from hundreds of trees; the Chastains had organized a campaign in his behalf. On the way home, Jewell drove with his friend Dave Dutchess. For the first time, he did not see an F.B.I. car following him, but he noticed an airplane flying low overhead. He drove another 20 miles, and the plane was still on him. "I said, 'Dave, do you think the F.B.I. would be following us in an airplane? It wouldn't be that hard to do, if they put some kind of beeper on the car.'" The plane followed them through Gainesville all the way to Atlanta—an hour's drive. "Just to make sure, we got off on an exit ramp and went about five miles back north. And I got out and took a picture. They followed us all the way back to the apartment! And they circled the apartment for about 15 minutes, until the F.B.I. car showed back up. I got very emotional. My cheeks got beet red. And Mom came home and said, 'What is going on? What is the matter?' It just destroyed the whole day."On September 2, Dave Dutchess and his fiancee, Beatty, were driving to their house in Tennessee. It was raining hard, and they noticed they were being followed by several F.B.I. cars. The storm grew worse, and they stopped at a hotel for the night. The next day, while getting coffee at a McDonald's, they were surrounded by F.B.I. agents. "We just want to talk to you. We are trying to be discreet." One agent, Dutchess recalled, spoke into his radio: "We have the suspect in hand." As they walked back toward their car, Dutchess said to Beatty, "They think I am his accomplice. I heard on the news they were looking for his accomplice!"After the interview, which lasted several hours, Dutchess spoke to Watson Bryant. "What did they ask you that concerns you?" Bryant asked him. "Well, I decided that I had to tell them the truth. Me and one of my friends used to set off pipe bombs for fun," Dutchess told him. "What?" Bryant exclaimed, incredulous. "Yeah, I told them we liked to throw pipe bombs down gopher holes when we lived out in West Virginia.""Did Richard know this friend?" Bryant asked apprehensively. "Hell, no. He never met him," Dutchess said, but Bryant knew that this could prolong the F.B.I.'s investigation perhaps by months. "I hung up and I was thinking, I cannot believe that I even know anyone who throws pipe bombs into gopher holes."As part of their strategy, Wood and Grant decided to mount a strong counterattack against the government. Wayne Grant had come up with the idea: Bobi Jewell should hold a press conference during the Democratic convention and make a direct plea to Bill Clinton. The day before she was to appear, Grant rehearsed her. It was difficult to work with Bobi; she was exhausted and could not stop crying. Confined under siege for almost a month, she could not see an end to it, since every day brought a new humiliation. The resident manager had threatened to take away their lease, and the manager's son was out selling pictures he took of them. A close friend from church was dying, Bobi said, and Richard could not go to see him, because of the swarm of F.B.I. agents and reporters who followed him everywhere. All of it came out in a rush in the conference room with Wayne Grant: Bobi had even had to give Bryant and Nadya Light the Olympic-basketball tickets she had won as colleague of the year, and every night she and her son were stuck together, staring at each other across the kitchen table. They were often irritable, and Richard sometimes lost his temper. "Mother, just shut up," he would tell her when she nagged him about the case. Then, Bobi later recalled, she would go into her bedroom and lie on the four-poster bed hoping that the photographers who rented an apartment across the way for $1,000 a day had no way of knowing what was going on.Grant kept careful notes on the session. Bobi was terrified about appearing in front of cameras. She sobbed and told him, "If I go on TV Monday, I'll be embarrassed. It will be, like, whenever I go anywhere, people will be looking at me: 'Did he do it or didn't he do it?' ""If you talked to the person who is in charge of the investigation, what would you say?" Grant asked her calmly. Bobi's voice was halting, but she was firm: "He is innocent. Clear his name and let us get back to a life that is normal."A few weeks later, Wayne Grant went to a party for a Bar Mitzvah, and a guest cornered him. She asked him if he had told Bobi Jewell to cry at the end of her press conference, and then added coldly, "Nice touch."The lawyers' strategy worked: after Bobi's press conference, the Jewells were deluged with interview requests. Bryant often received 100 phone calls a day. Bobi soon developed a system: letters from Oprah Winfrey, Sally Jessy Raphael, and TV producers were stacked on the console in the living room; flowers and baskets of Godiva chocolates and cheese and crackers from the networks were sent to the offices of Wood & Grant and then on to a children's hospital.At the U.S. Attorney's Office, it had become increasingly clear to Kent Alexander that something had to be done about Richard Jewell. Janet Reno had seen Bobi Jewell on TV and was moved by her sincerity. Privately, Reno and Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick were said to be concerned about the heavy-handed tactics of the F.B.I. "The case had become a total embarrassment," a Justice Department official told me, but Alexander was in a complicated situation. He was working closely with the F.B.I., and there was no sign that the bureau was ready to let go, despite growing consternation among the local agents that the Washington command center had mishandled the case. And there was another problem: Alexander did not trust Lin Wood.By late September, there was a tremendous strain within the team Bryant had hastily assembled. The other lawyers accused Jack Martin of cutting private deals with his friend Kent Alexander, pulling focus, and not being tough enough. For his part, Alexander, according to Martin, admired Bryant even though he believed he was a loose cannon, but he was fed up with Lin Wood."Alexander would say something fairly candid to me, and I would report it to the attorneys, and the next day he would see it on TV," said Jack Martin. "Alexander had checked out Lin, and he knew that he was a take-no-prisoners guy." The lawyers often argued among themselves. Wood insisted on a full-blowout press-attack strategy. Bryant had mastered his sound bite: "The F.B.I. is a 500-pound gorilla who will kick the shit out of anyone." Martin wanted the lawyers to ease up on the hyperbole: "I would say, 'We do not need to do this.' And Lin would say, 'Let's go public with this.' He was manic about it." In one argument, Wood told him, "Goddamn it, Martin, you're like my ex-wives. There isn't anything you can say I won't object to."There was an atmosphere of extreme apprehension between Bryant and Jewell as they drove to F.B.I. headquarters on the afternoon of October 6. They were on their way to what would seemingly be a session with conclusional overtones, but Jewell was worried: What if this meeting was a trick? It was difficult to believe that the bureau was really ending its two-month-long investigation into his life. For weeks, Jack Martin and Bryant had been going back and forth with Kent Alexander. Finally, Jewell had agreed to an unusual suggestion: if he submitted to a lengthy voluntary interview with the bureau, and if Division 5 was satisfied, then perhaps the Justice Department could issue a letter publicly stating that he was no longer a suspect. Jewell tried to imagine the questions he would be asked. "I wanted to look at everything from their angle," he told me, "trying to assess it and reassess it in my head."On the day of Jewell's exoneration, Jay Leno apologized for having called him a Unadoofus.Kent Alexander had set a firm ground rule: Only one lawyer representing Jewell could be in the room. It had been agreed that Jack Martin, the criminal specialist, would be the man, which enraged Lin Wood. "You could really see how these guys did not like each other," Jewell said."I am not comfortable with the one-lawyer agreement," Wood told John Davis, Kent Alexander's second-in-command, when they were assembled. "We have an agreement. If you attempt to renegotiate it, I will have egg on my face," Davis said, adding, "You are not a man of your word." With that, Wood recalled, he rose from his chair and started screaming, "You are not going to say that to me, you son of a bitch!" Kent Alexander interrupted, saying, "This is deteriorating. We aim to stop this. Let's just regroup."When Jewell, Davis, and Martin finally sat down for the interview, Larry Landers, a special agent with the G.B.I., and F.B.I. special agent Bill Lewis had lists of questions with blank space for answers in front of them. On the wall of the windowless room, there were extensive aerial photographs of the park and, as a prop, an actual park bench was later brought in. Martin believed that the agents intended to resolve areas in the affidavits and other questions: Had Richard ever accessed Candyman's Candyland for information on the Anarchists' Cookbook? Had Richard picked up any pieces of pipe when the park was under construction? Had he told anyone, "Take my picture now, because I am going to be famous"? None of this had happened, Jewell said. All he could remember telling someone was that he was off to Atlanta and "going to be in that mess down there," meaning the traffic jams. They pressed him about seemingly inconsistent statements he had made on the morning of the bombing: Why had he told Agent Poor everything was normal when he checked the perimeter of the fence? Jewell explained that he had been walking the "inside of the fence." He once again explained that he had wanted to work the sound-and-light tower so that he could watch the entertainment; he had arranged for his mother to hear Kenny Rogers four days before the explosion.The area, he told Landers, was "a sweet site" and a great place to look at girls. During a break, Martin asked about all his references to women. Jewell said he wanted them to know he wasn't gay. On several occasions, Landers became annoyed: Why couldn't Jewell pin down the times? Had he seen the drunks on the bench between 10:30 and 11 or between 11 and 11:30? Why hadn't he looked at his watch? Jewell later recalled, "I said, 'I don't go through my life looking at my watch. I don't care about time. When the bomb went off, I did not look at my watch.' They were wanting to know what time I went to the bathroom and stuff like that. When you have the runs, you are not really concerned about what time it is. You are concerned with getting to the bathroom."On the day after the F.B.I. meeting, Jack Martin dictated a 27-page account of everything that had been said during the six-hour interview. In the last moments, Davis said, "he wanted to give Richard the opportunity once and for all to say that he didn't do it." Jewell, Martin wrote, "unequivocally and fortunately said that he had nothing to do with the bomb and didn't know anything about the bomb and if he did he would be the first to deliver the bastard to their door." When Martin walked out, he thought to himself, This really was a formality. They had nothing.In November a rumor swept through the newsroom of The A.J.C. that Cox newspaper executives were rethinking their news policies. According to one reporter, "The sloppiness of the Jewell reporting and the lack of sources was the last straw." A reporter named Carrie Teegardin was assigned to write a piece examining how the media spotlight was turned on Richard Jewell. In large part, her article wound up being an examination of the role of The A.J.C. After Wood and Grant threatened to sue, the article was killed. "We didn't get through the editing of it," John Walter said. "The Jewells' attorney began saying, 'We're thinking lawsuit' . . . and that made us more cautious." Meanwhile, Lin Wood and Wayne Grant were busy holding meetings with lawyers from NBC and Piedmont College. At NBC, Tom Brokaw's carelessness reportedly cost the network more than $500,000 to settle Jewell's claims, although Jewell's lawyers would not confirm a figure, BROKAW GOOFED AND NBC PAID, the New York Daily News would later headline. In talks with Ray Cleere, the figure of $450,000 by way of settlement was first suggested, then withdrawn when Piedmont College learned that it had insurance. "This will cost them millions now," Lin Wood believes.On one occasion I asked Richard Jewell if he had any theories about who might have placed the bomb. Jewell said he had popped "two or three theories off the top of my head" on the night he was interviewed by the F.B.I. "I have gone over that night hundreds of times in my head. You try to think, What type of person would do that? I know it is someone who wanted to hurt people. It is someone who is sick. I hope they find him so he can get the help he needs. Because I am totally torn up about what happened. Every day I think about it, and I will think about it for the rest of my life."Jewell often speaks with Bryant three times a day. As Jewell searches for a new job, he hangs around Bryant's office, and he recently studied handwriting analysis at the police academy. He has been offered several security jobs with Georgia companies, but he is hoping he will be hired as a Cobb County deputy. In the meantime, Bryant, Wood, and Grant have become sought-after speakers on the First Amendment.At F.B.I. headquarters in late October, Bobi Jewell broke down and cried as she identified their possessions—the Disney tapes, the Tupperware, Richard's AT&T uniforms, address books. It was a tableau of ordinary middle-class life, laid out on brown paper on a long conference-room table. "I just don't fucking believe this," Watson Bryant said angrily as he packed Bobi's videos into packing crates. "The agents tried to shake my hand," Bobi told me. "I wouldn't touch them." It took 10 hours to remove their possessions, Bobi recalled, and four minutes to return them.The F.B.I. is working on a new and elaborate theory of who did place the bomb in Centennial Park. There is an informed opinion that the backpack discovered a week earlier had in fact been a test run to check F.B.I. procedures, and that the bomber—perhaps a member of a militia group—was quite experienced and had struck before. After a torrent of criticism in the press, Louis Freeh announced that the F.B.I. had arrested Harold Nicholson, an alleged spy for Russia, and he used the opportunity to appear on the Today show and Good Morning America, hyping his role in what was a minor arrest, according to one former F.B.I. agent.In Australia in November, Bill Clinton was asked about his campaign contributions from Indonesia. "One of the things I would urge you to do, remembering what happened to Mr. Jewell in Atlanta, remembering what has happened to so many of the accusations . . . that have been made against me that turned out to be totally baseless, I just think that we ought to . . . get the facts out." When Jewell learned of his comment, he pulled up the transcript from the Internet and became angry: "The president is just using me, like everyone else."What rights does a private citizen have against the government? The legal precedent for suing the F.B.I., Bivens v. Six Unknown Agents, focuses on the behavior of individual agents. Wood believes that Jewell has a strong case against Johnson and Rosario. When Wood learned of Colonel Ressler, he hired him as a possible trial expert. In December, the F.B.I. announced that it would pay up to $500,000 to anyone who could lead it to the Olympic Park bomber.As Jewell and I drove back from Habersham County in November, he went over the early-morning hours of July 27: "I remember all of the people who were my responsibility. I remember the guys' faces who were flying through the air. I remember people screaming. The sirens going off. I don't think I will ever forget any of that. You just kind of wish sometimes. You think, Could I have done something else? . . . What if we only had five more minutes? Then maybe nobody would have been hurt. But you are what-if-ing. I have been over it a thousand times. I think we could not have done it any better. I think that is something I will always be wondering."He said he was not sure if he would ever get a job in law enforcement again, particularly since he had been held up as a cartoon figure. On the day of Jewell's exoneration, Jay Leno apologized for having called him a Unadoofus, and said, "If Jewell wins his lawsuit with NBC, he will be my new boss." He later said that this was "the greatest week in trailer-park history." The Atlanta radio station 96 Rock had put billboards of Jewell all over town; "Freebird," they said, a reference to the Lynyrd Skynyrd song. Jewell would later file suit against the station, but the billboard's message was clear. Jewell knows that for many people in America there will perhaps always be a subtle doubt: What if, after all, Richard Jewell really did do it? What if the government let him go simply because it could not make its case? Then he becomes not the innocent Richard Jewell, but the Richard Jewell who may be innocent. "You don't get back what you were originally," he told me. "I don't think I will ever get that back. The first three days, I was supposedly their hero—the person who saves lives. They don't refer to me that way anymore. Now I am the Olympic Park bombing suspect. That's the guy they thought did it. "February 1997 | Vanity Fair
年届九十的东木导演最近十年里的作品基本上都是人物传记题材,从总统到飞机师,从狙击手到毒贩,再到这部新作里的平民英雄。他总能在真实人物的生平故事里提炼出最震撼的闪光点,从而提升整部传记片的表现层次,以及凸显出发人深省的现实诉求,这部新作自然也不例外。一位平民英雄对抗政府与媒体的事件可以有不少表现角度,而导演采用最平铺直叙的方式依然散发出扣人心弦的魅力。滴水不漏的叙事手法令观众看得屏息静气,爆炸
年届九十的东木导演最近十年里的作品基本上都是人物传记题材,从总统到飞机师,从狙击手到毒贩,再到这部新作里的平民英雄。他总能在真实人物的生平故事里提炼出最震撼的闪光点,从而提升整部传记片的表现层次,以及凸显出发人深省的现实诉求,这部新作自然也不例外。一位平民英雄对抗政府与媒体的事件可以有不少表现角度,而导演采用最平铺直叙的方式依然散发出扣人心弦的魅力。滴水不漏的叙事手法令观众看得屏息静气,爆炸案发生的场景段落拍出了希区柯克式的胆战心惊气氛,群像速写与镜头捕捉,以及精准的场面调度让人惊叹。除了深厚的导演功力外,自然还少不了一众演技出色的演员支撑起这个剧本。尽管人物塑造局限于真实性而有脸谱化的嫌疑,比如像女记者和联邦探员,却仍能在某几场关键的段落中传达出发人深省的意味。奥斯卡女主角凯西·贝茨扮演的母亲角色最为真挚感人,她的绝望、愤怒、伤感情绪都表现得丝丝入扣,尤其是在记者会上的讲话令人忍不住泪流满面。
回到影片主题上,这部新片跟《萨利机长》有不少共通之处,借助这位平民英雄为自己平反冤屈的事件过程中不断质疑政府权力的正义与合理性。一个清白无辜的平民百姓可以被怀疑是十恶不赦的罪犯,还被用尽各种手段(诱骗、骚扰与监听)来套取证据以便定罪控告。与其说这是司法部门工作中的漏洞,倒不如说是公权力对人民的蔑视,用影片中角色的一句台词来概括:我害怕政府更甚于恐怖分子。主人公一直在为这种权力辩护,甚至主动配合,深信自身清白便能脱身,直至最后才明白要主动出击对抗蛮横的权力才能平反正名。
除了公权力之外,剧中主人公还要面对追求关注度的媒体,他和家人的生活逐渐陷于媒体曝光和骚扰的漩涡里。剧本透过刻画女记者这个具有反派意味的角色,导演不留情面地对编造不实消息新闻的媒体予以强力抨击。在互联网信息泛滥的时代,越来越多的媒体不惜编造新闻博取读者眼球和点击量,甚至虚构故事而对新闻当事人造成不可估量的打击和影响。发生在20多年前的这个事件却早已透露出如此远见,足可令人反思新闻媒体的本质。
克林特·伊斯特伍德拍电影的速度真的很快,而且质量也很高。
2018年圣诞档才上映了《骡子》,2019年圣诞档又有了新片《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》上映。
影片改编自真实事件,1996年亚特兰大奥运会时,身为保安的理查德·朱维尔在公园发现了炸弹。
虽然
克林特·伊斯特伍德拍电影的速度真的很快,而且质量也很高。
2018年圣诞档才上映了《骡子》,2019年圣诞档又有了新片《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》上映。
影片改编自真实事件,1996年亚特兰大奥运会时,身为保安的理查德·朱维尔在公园发现了炸弹。
虽然炸弹还是爆炸了,但是由于理查德和警察们在此之前尽可能疏散了人群,从而减少了伤亡。
然而理查德还没当几天英雄,就被怀疑是爆炸案的主谋。
人们说他自导自演了这场拯救百姓的戏码,由罪犯摇身一变成了英雄。
“成为爆炸案的嫌疑人”是怎样一种体验,远远比我们想象中残酷得多。
因为你的一举一动都会被人们过度解读,在人们眼中你的一切正常的行为都是你的伪装,你的一切“不正常”的行为都是你的犯罪证据。
一直以来以成为警长探员为目标的男主,生活里做了很多越界的事情,高速上抓酒驾这种,做着一系列正义的事情,但是收到的却是数不清的投诉。也因为这份正义,他发现了一个可疑包裹,于是拯救了很多性命。他成了英雄,但却遭受举报,怀疑,调查。他的母亲只为他骄傲了三天。他的墨镜也只带了三天。
即使如此,在被调查的过程里仍然对企图欺骗他获取将他送去电击的探员们以尊重与配合。即使遭受委屈之下还表示他们
一直以来以成为警长探员为目标的男主,生活里做了很多越界的事情,高速上抓酒驾这种,做着一系列正义的事情,但是收到的却是数不清的投诉。也因为这份正义,他发现了一个可疑包裹,于是拯救了很多性命。他成了英雄,但却遭受举报,怀疑,调查。他的母亲只为他骄傲了三天。他的墨镜也只带了三天。
即使如此,在被调查的过程里仍然对企图欺骗他获取将他送去电击的探员们以尊重与配合。即使遭受委屈之下还表示他们代表着美国政府。但是日积月累之下,他终于在某一刻他发起了质问,警探们所花费的时间有获取到任何证据吗?在警探们全力追究他的时间里,真正的嫌犯是否还会制造第二次爆炸,以后任何的保安在看到可疑包裹时还会上报吗?不会,他们不想成为下一个朱维尔。
可是,六年后,朱维尔肩上佩戴了一枚有权威的标志,他曾经向往的,又失望了的标志。生活可能就是这个样子哦,无论遭受了多少,生活还是要继续,以自己也不确定的方式生活。
两大权威,政府和媒体,都使出了强大的火力射向了这个挽救了很多条性命的英雄身上。那时的媒体还很少,网络信息流转还没有那么快,导向性书写新闻的媒体人还很少,当时为了销量,她会不惜一起去寻找头版。但最后她还会去验证真实性,还会流下眼泪。可是,她确实毁了一个男人的生活。如今呢,新闻已经不是真正媒体人在写了,我们看到的更不见的是什么真实了,那些为了流量而引导性的文字,真的是一把把匕首,不知道无意间就刺向了何人。不知道会坏到什么程度呢?
再说男主的性格,一根筋的正义,毫无怀疑的相信着那个圆形的标志及其背后。善解人意到善解要将他推向万劫不复之地的人。律师和他的妈妈一定都有一种怒其不争之感,可是最后的质问还是很意外闪光的。
电影节奏还不错,穿插着幽默,不会一直沉重沉闷,但是有些情节有些让我觉得混乱,那个安装窃听以及第一次被安排来窃听的人物的身份直到那么久远才弄清楚。有一点我怀疑,警察用欺骗的方式抓走嫌疑人?真的可以这样子吗?
我旁边的女士一开始就睡着了,好像是爆炸声把她弄醒了。这一次只有一个人拿起了手机,但是有着听起来像是五十岁或以上的女士在讲解。不过算是我还比较不错的一次观影体验了。
PS:幸好没耽误董老师进场。再一次掉了手机又从原地儿找回来了。??
在我的观影序列里,这应该是老头百万美元宝贝以后最好的一部作品,也是可以提前排进我今年个人观影十佳的电影。
毫无疑问离90周岁还差1年4个月的伊斯特伍德依然有着旺盛的创作欲,而创作于最直接的来源便是他的愤怒,愤怒来源就是他老右棍的政治立场。在好莱坞整体左倾的现实情况下,右翼电影越来越被压制,像约翰韦恩那种说不好就干的演员也在好莱坞销声匿迹。政治正确成为好莱坞自我审查
在我的观影序列里,这应该是老头百万美元宝贝以后最好的一部作品,也是可以提前排进我今年个人观影十佳的电影。
毫无疑问离90周岁还差1年4个月的伊斯特伍德依然有着旺盛的创作欲,而创作于最直接的来源便是他的愤怒,愤怒来源就是他老右棍的政治立场。在好莱坞整体左倾的现实情况下,右翼电影越来越被压制,像约翰韦恩那种说不好就干的演员也在好莱坞销声匿迹。政治正确成为好莱坞自我审查的最大门槛,过了这道门槛电影的上映才有可能。
在拍《被拯救的姜戈》时候,小李子因为说不出“尼格”这个词,电影整体进度被拖慢,吉米福克斯和塞缪尔杰克逊轮流劝,小李子也表示对黑兄弟说不出这个词。最后在昆汀的授意下塞缪尔对小李子说:“你特么说了也没关系,我和你也特么不是朋友。”以后,小李子才勉为其难的完成影片拍摄。
好莱坞整体左转的同时也让文化在肤色表达上越来越多彩,但在立场表达上越来越单一。2019年在艺术上有卓越表达并且重新定义了特写镜头的《小丑》拿下了威尼斯,但是在左轨道奔跑的好莱坞里,可以看到《小丑》基本上与奥斯卡最佳导演和最佳影片无缘了。
话说回来,在好莱坞压抑了那么久的老爷子拍完《骡子》以后总算逮到了一个机会拍了《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》,千载难逢的机会老头的红脖子能不亮一亮么,压了那么久的恶气能不吐一吐么。
无论是什么电影,基底都应该是对人道主义的体现,对良知的赞美、对真相的挖掘和对丑恶的咒骂,而应不是立场的左右,《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》首先表达的第一层就是电影的基底。
电影中的初始事件就是朱维尔的善举,因为一次英勇的拯救才导致了后续诬陷构害的发生,而组成构害朱维尔网的主要有三个节点,一个节点是查尔斯格林饰演的克里尔博士,另一个节点是王尔德饰演的斯克鲁格斯,最后一个节点是乔恩哈姆饰演的肖探员,而他也是整个织网的中心,肖探员从得到朱维尔可能是凶手的信息之后与高级知识分子苟合,到放出消息与新闻媒体互为苟合。三点构成大网一点点的覆盖在理查德朱维尔的身上,而保护理查德朱维尔并且最终破局的尖刀则是山姆洛克威尔饰演的沃森律师,不断挖掘真相,信任朱维尔并引导他建立起自我成长的弧光。
抛开影片里所体现出人的良知,另一个层面上电影表现的也是高知加媒体加体制所联立的精英阶层对于普通红脖子的迫害。
红脖子是最初南方开垦美国的普通农民们,他们在烈日下勤作、山野中拓荒,是着构建美国最基础的价值观之一。红脖子最不能忍受便是对自我领地的侵犯,是对个人尊严的折辱。在决斗之风盛行的19世纪,因为一个眼神不对,红脖子们都会拉开场地干一架,当时有记者曾经说过“在南方找不到一个没有决斗过的议员”。
而电影中FBI不仅侵犯了朱维尔的土地也折辱了他的尊严。在朱维尔一次又一次配合调查,家中的器物一件被一件搬出的时候,沃森律师才会发火大吼:“你不能被侵犯尊严。”这一句嘶吼也是最直接体现导演自我表达的台词。而种种屈辱的积压之后,朱维尔才在联邦调查局的办公室里里对肖探员绝地反击。
跳脱出电影来看好莱坞现况,引领好莱坞向左跑的正是编剧所代表的高级知识分子精英阶层,而社会中白左们的主要口舌也正是各大新闻报纸媒体们,并且这一切都是体制默许甚至主导的。所以老爷子要在电影里特别讽刺的出现一个蠢蛋克里尔博士,要在剧中特别政治不正确构建一个与探员性交易的女记者,要在反派中塑造一个特别狠毒主导迫害行为的联邦探员。
从《百万美元宝贝》阴险的“来自东德的妓女”到《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》里“我们(苏联)的政府认为这个人是有罪的,那么他就是清白的。”伊斯特伍德在电影里表现自己的立场也是时时刻刻,作为2019年末一部老右政治不正确电影,《朱维尔》的表现堪称优秀。
《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》是老爷子的一击勾拳,90岁的老人依然如此愤怒、如此发声,对比之下某些导演年纪轻轻就开始喝养生茶、佛系表达了,实在令人可惜。
后记:
1,对于这片子的喜爱与打分是特别出自私人感情的,爱吃甜甜圈的胖子不就是我么,不拒绝任何美食不也是我么。从电影中朱维尔蠢蠢的跑来跑去让大家疏散开始,自己的眼泪就止不住的流,到最后朱维尔吃着甜甜圈泣不成声的时候,自己的情绪也随着崩溃了。感谢伊斯特伍德,在新年开始就让我看到了那么好的电影。
2,凯西贝茨看的时候就感觉肯定可以拿个表演奖,回来一看果然拿了个金球奖提名,还中了一个评论协会奖。所以说演员的表演一部分看自己一部分看导演,表演效果比美国恐怖故事高到不知道哪里去了。
彩蛋:
1999年6月,披露朱厄尔是作案者的两名记者斯克鲁格斯(Kathy Scruggs)和马茨(Ron Martz)因拒绝透露消息来源而被起诉。
又是一部堪称经典传播学教材的新闻事件类影片,尽管是20多年前的事件,放在今天也十分具有现世意义。舆论所导向的往往并不是“应该相信的”,而成为了“愿意相信的”,更绝对一点,甚至成为了“有利可图的”。
人们需要一个英雄时,就创造一个英雄,然后再压榨这个英雄的可用利益;人们需要一个罪人时,便创造一个罪人,再用一切可以想象的恶言去发泄轰击。很悲哀的一件事,即使是《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》这
又是一部堪称经典传播学教材的新闻事件类影片,尽管是20多年前的事件,放在今天也十分具有现世意义。舆论所导向的往往并不是“应该相信的”,而成为了“愿意相信的”,更绝对一点,甚至成为了“有利可图的”。
人们需要一个英雄时,就创造一个英雄,然后再压榨这个英雄的可用利益;人们需要一个罪人时,便创造一个罪人,再用一切可以想象的恶言去发泄轰击。很悲哀的一件事,即使是《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》这个电影本身也是对主人公的又一次消费。可这就是这个世界样子,从不完美。
理查德在最后获得结案书的时候,他肥胖的脸上挤出难看的皱纹笑着,他赢了,他真的赢了吗?他已经被这个社会消磨得失去了原本的自我。他一口咬下的那个甜甜圈,我相信,是苦的。
说说剧作方面的缺点,演讲抒情的情绪渲染过多。说教味还是太重了,老是借角色之口对社会进行直接性的质问。还有角色形象塑造,FBI的形象还是太过呆板了,一味的丑化政府部门,多处关于FBI取证的细节在后续并没有对剧作造成实质性的影响,而成了为了丑化而丑化的设定,有点毁坏剧本条理性,把剧本严谨的逻辑性消解了。
以及凯西所代表的无良新闻传媒业,前期剧本将其塑造成了为了消息不惜出卖色相的唯利是图传媒业符号,其实是很能继续造作的一条线,却在电影一半的时候因为被骂了一顿就出现反转,实在是有毁角色的人物弧光,而在凯西良心发现之后也并没有对理查德的脱罪起到任何舆论导向上的帮助,而是角色直接凭空消失,实在是太浪费太浪费!可惜了好好的这一条线。
作者:csh
本文首发于《陀螺电影》
像《骡子》与《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》这样的作品,在院线电影中实在太罕见了。
观众们或许很难辨明它们的独特之处,但它们确实能够给人一种极为流畅、舒适的观感。而这恰恰是因为,伊斯特伍德的这些作品,保持着某种惊人的古典性。如果说新浪潮的猛将、时年89岁的让-吕克·戈达尔,直至2018年的《影像之书》为止,都在试图创造更加
作者:csh
本文首发于《陀螺电影》
像《骡子》与《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》这样的作品,在院线电影中实在太罕见了。
观众们或许很难辨明它们的独特之处,但它们确实能够给人一种极为流畅、舒适的观感。而这恰恰是因为,伊斯特伍德的这些作品,保持着某种惊人的古典性。如果说新浪潮的猛将、时年89岁的让-吕克·戈达尔,直至2018年的《影像之书》为止,都在试图创造更加新奇的影像;那么与戈达尔一同出生于1930年的伊斯特伍德,恰恰就是古典好莱坞风格的捍卫者。
在《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》中,他仍旧在使用着这种锤炼了数十年的古典技艺。或许许多欧洲电影迷、尤其是新浪潮爱好者,会对这种传统抱持着某种轻蔑的态度。但是,古典之所以能够成为古典,其实也有它的道理——这种影像之所以能够给人带来最为流畅、舒适的观感,其实是经过时间检验的。
那么,什么是好莱坞的古典主义风格?它主要指涉的是好莱坞古典时期电影中,以连贯性剪辑系统为主体的影像风格。我们熟悉的过肩正反打、视线匹配等技巧,都是这种风格最重要的武器。它们会引导我们关注最重要的信息——发言人或是视线的落点等——以此来推动叙事的发展。但与此同时,它们还保持着一种惊人的透明性(“连贯性风格”之名恰恰来源于此),不会让我们意识到摄影机的存在,也让我们得以彻底浸没在影像中。
但是,存在这些既定的技巧,并不代表古典风格就是一成不变的套路。就像长镜头风格也能拍出杰作与废品一样,在大师手中,正反打也能展现出极尽细腻的用法——在《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》中,伊斯特伍德就让我们见识了这一点。
在理查德·朱维尔、他的律师沃森·布莱恩特与两位警官对谈的那场至关重要的戏中,正反打的细腻性体现得淋漓尽致,在这场戏里,朱维尔第一次发自肺腑地对着FBI的警官进行了批判。很多观众一定觉得这场戏很能调动情绪、很“燃”,但他们很可能没有意识到,伊斯特伍德是通过恰到好处的正反打变体达成这一点的。因为,这种古典主义的风格图式实在是太“透明”了。
在刚开始的时候,朱维尔、律师和两位警官被分解成两个双人镜头,但它们其实都是“伪双人镜头”。在朱维尔和律师所处的镜头中,灯光主要关照的是密集地进行发言的朱维尔,而身形较暗、较为沉默的律师处于画面的次要地位;在两位警官的那个镜头中,发言人主要是乔恩·哈姆扮演的、咄咄逼人的汤姆·肖。
所以,这两组双人镜头之间的正反打,其实是朱维尔与肖之间一对一的交锋。随着这场戏的发展,这一点变得越来越明显。之所以正反打又名“过肩正反打”,就是因为在A听B说话的时候,我们常常会看到A模糊的肩部,这样我们就能同时体认谈话的双方。
而在这场戏中,当两位警官说话的时候,我们本来能够看到朱维尔和律师的肩部。但随着谈话的深入,我们就只能看到朱维尔的肩部了——伪双人镜头渐渐变成了真正的单人镜头。伊斯特伍德微微将镜头右移,同时调整景别,最后我们看到的,是朱维尔与肖的特写正反打。
伊斯特伍德通过这种方式,一方面让我们逐渐关注场景中最重要的焦点,一方面通过越来越近的景别,创造了一种循序渐进的紧张感。最有趣的是,当朱维尔在特写镜头中慷慨陈词、批判FBI之后,景别旋即变远,我们再次看到了两个松弛的双人镜头——这恰恰是让观众纾解情绪的过程。
在这场迷人的戏中,伊斯特伍德用这种最不易被觉察的、古典主义的手法,发挥了推动叙事进展的指示性效果,也达成了抒发情绪的表现性效果。在很多时候,即使是那些欧洲艺术电影的风格,也都在发挥着这两种效果。
当然,伊斯特伍德这部技艺精湛的古典之作,不仅仅使用了连贯性剪辑这套武器。其实,更为久远的好莱坞古典主义电影,是并不排斥较远景别的场面调度的,只不过这种调度也和剪辑一样,会被用来展现透明化的叙事——霍华德·霍克斯正是连贯性调度的大师。
在《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》中,伊斯特伍德通过与剪辑同等细腻的调度,在中远景中展现了奥运会场地、报纸编辑部等一系列的空间,以及这些空间中的群像。我们看到的不只是朱维尔这个个体,还有一个范围广阔的社群。正因如此,这种风格也非常适合用来表述这种社会议题。
那种用超近景别构成的电影,其实是晚近好莱坞电影追求感官刺激的策略。所以,伊斯特伍德的古典性,不仅相对于那些追求电影语汇突破的欧洲电影,也相对于那些当代的好莱坞电影。看他的电影,我们感受到的不是刺激,而是流畅与舒适,我们真的在聆听一个好好被讲述的故事,真的在思考一个含义深远的历史悖论。
有趣的是,理查德·朱维尔也恰恰是这么一个“古典主义”的个体。他坚守着那种颇为古典的价值观,无限忠诚地履行着自己的职责,所以他不会“出错”。在这个万物失格的时代,像朱维尔这样的人早已成为了少数派。
年近九十岁的伊斯特伍德,坚守着这种古典主义风格,或许也正是因为,在向观众传达自己所思所想的时候,他希望自己的影像不要出一点差错。
一. 对理查德的人物描绘很棒 但剧情的全面性让人失望
作为一部由真实事件改编的片子,制作团队确实在刻画当事人的来龙去脉上下了工夫,还算流畅地刻画了一个坚定拥护司法系统的人的信仰逐步破灭的全过程。
但是剧情的全面性有些令人失望。全片除了对理查德的描绘之外,对同样在这个事件中扮演重要角色的媒体和司法的代表人物的刻画过于脸谱化。在为英雄正名的过程中,只有律师全程履行了职责、
一. 对理查德的人物描绘很棒 但剧情的全面性让人失望
作为一部由真实事件改编的片子,制作团队确实在刻画当事人的来龙去脉上下了工夫,还算流畅地刻画了一个坚定拥护司法系统的人的信仰逐步破灭的全过程。
但是剧情的全面性有些令人失望。全片除了对理查德的描绘之外,对同样在这个事件中扮演重要角色的媒体和司法的代表人物的刻画过于脸谱化。在为英雄正名的过程中,只有律师全程履行了职责、理查德的妈妈发表了一次公共演讲、理查德自己功过参半;其他人完全没有起到任何帮助作用。
二. Paul和Sam把理查德和律师演活了
理查德是一个很常见的美国小城的善良邻家大胖哥哥的形象。怂怂的“面团宝宝”、正义的使者、规则维护者,都是他,Paul的表演让我对这个人物的冲突性没有任何质疑。美女记者的最好看的一段戏是在发表了爆炸新闻后被全体致敬后的得意和疯癫。不过大多数观众最喜欢的应该会是Sam的痞痞律师吧,表演完全没毛病,如果我会再看一次这个电影的话,八成是因为想重温Sam的戏。
三. 看完觉得一口气憋在胸口 总觉得故事没讲完
没有看嗨。因为直到影片结束,还觉得有什么没有演出来。诚然本片主角是理查德,对于理查德的心理变化和对司法的观点变化的描绘得很详细,但是对司法和媒体这两大影响着“为英雄正名”事件的人物代表选择了基本是纯负面的角度去描绘。
当片子出现了明确的好人和坏人的阵营时,观影的嗨感会下降。
四. 总而言之太脸谱化
对人物的描绘不够丰满,对几个主要角色的处理过于扁平。
反面脸谱化了司法和媒体。让整个片子少了一些真实感。FBI探员和美女记者都使用了典型的坏人光影处理(如FBI探员哄着理查德录爆恐吓语音的典型坏人化光影、美女记者在主编室争取发表爆炸新闻的脸部明暗交叠光影)。
FBI的两个探员一个没有起到啥作用,一个全程在违反规则、跟着感觉走,在大费周章做了调查但没找到任何证据的情况下,依旧认为理查德是凶犯,FBI探员真的只有这个水平吗?(手动摊手表情)
原以为在影片后半部分能帮到理查德的美女记者并没有起到什么作用。只是在现场走了一圈、恍然大悟了一下、跑去酒吧骂了一句FBI探员、在发布会上流了几滴眼泪,然后就没有然后了。
总评:
满分十分的话,我给六分。
加分项:1)对理查德心理变化的描绘 2)演员的表演 3)场景的设置
尤其是对一个坚定拥护司法系统的人的信仰逐步破灭的全过程描绘得很流畅。
减分项:1)脸谱化司法和媒体代表 2)故事展现角度片面(比如:难道声名显赫的FBI真的只会揪着一个没有任何作案证据的人去调查,没有同步调查任何其他人?)
看了电影后不是很能理解为什么这部电影在颁奖季没有什么水花,所以便在网上搜了搜评论。在烂番茄上,这部电影的媒体评分只有73%,远远不及《利剑出鞘》等电影。我更疑惑了,于是仔细看了看这些媒体的评价。最终引导我看到了一个来自亚特兰大宪章报对这部电影的批评。批评主要针对电影中女记者Kathy Scruggs的塑造。这位女记者不折手段的用性交易的方式从FBI探员那里获取了他们即将对理查德·朱维尔展开调
看了电影后不是很能理解为什么这部电影在颁奖季没有什么水花,所以便在网上搜了搜评论。在烂番茄上,这部电影的媒体评分只有73%,远远不及《利剑出鞘》等电影。我更疑惑了,于是仔细看了看这些媒体的评价。最终引导我看到了一个来自亚特兰大宪章报对这部电影的批评。批评主要针对电影中女记者Kathy Scruggs的塑造。这位女记者不折手段的用性交易的方式从FBI探员那里获取了他们即将对理查德·朱维尔展开调查的消息,从而一手导致了朱维尔从“英雄”到“凶手”的噩梦之旅。实际上,大部分对电影的负面评价都针对于这个女记者的形象。我在看电影的时候已经预感到了,这个女记者的形象触犯到了不仅仅是媒体的职业道德问题,而是已经触犯了目前最敏感的性别政治问题。
这部电影像老爷子的绝大多数电影一样以展现事实真相为中心。所以批评者不可能不注意到这个女记者用性交易来获取信息这一细节是否是真的事实?毕竟人已经去世,之前也没有任何证据。所以很多批评者嘲讽这个电影是“太过戏剧化”的处理了真人真事。有的评论直接点出了“抹黑女性”。以至于饰演这个角色的演员奥利维亚·王尔德不得不站出来撇清:她作为一个演员无法决定和改变剧本的内容。个人觉得老爷子确实不应该在电影里包含这一幕。但同时也认为这可能就是老爷子的一种讽刺。毕竟当年FBI在撤销对朱维尔的调查后,朱维尔转头就控告了包括NBC在内的多家媒体,大部分媒体都和他庭外和解了,只有亚特兰大宪章报坚持认为他们的报道是基于客观事实的推论,并没有捏造和污蔑的地方。所以,一个FBI内部的消息,是怎么被一个女记者知道的呢?老爷子如此推理,恰如当年的记者们通过朱维尔这个笨拙肥胖还与妈妈合住的单身白人男子形象推论他是凶手一模一样。其实这个电影里处处都是这种嘲讽。因为朱维尔本身就是一个不完美的小人物,他除了被不公正的对待外,还有过激的历史,不交税和一屋子的枪。即便到了最后FBI找不出任何可以指控他是凶手的证据,那位FBI的探员还是铮铮有词的指责朱维尔:我知道你就是凶手,虽然我没有证据,但我知道你就是。那位FBI探员并不仇恨朱维尔,也没有理由仇恨朱维尔,他只是对自己深信不疑,这种态度其实是大多数人的写照。如果最后不是真凶浮出水面,多少人会一直怀疑朱维尔的清白?
不过亚特兰大宪章报的那个批评最有意思的其实是后面的读者评论,多达四百多条。而这四百多条评论的焦点大部分转向了特朗普。电影里有一句台词提到了"quid pro quo"。这句话最近不要太火。其实这个电影的剧本早在几年前就完成了,电影的拍摄也是在特朗普被弹劾调查之前就已经完工了。但是谁让老爷子pro特朗普呢?!整个美国的媒体都在骂特朗普,老爷子却说在“希拉里和特朗普之间,他肯定要选特朗普”。这简直就是媒体公敌了。就算没有那个女记者,估计老爷子的这个电影也不会受到媒体的好评。但是有了这句台词,媒体又可以推论:老爷子在借电影讽刺民主党对特朗普的调查。其实个人认为老爷子并非真的支持特朗普,他明确表示过不会以资金或其它任何形式来支持特朗普,他只是表明在希拉里和特朗普之间,他觉得特朗普至少是比较诚实的。个人觉得美国媒体和“言论自由”简直就是矛盾的两级。鲜有媒体是没有自己的立场的,但是你不能有和他们对立的立场。我天天听崔娃的节目,这个节目的立场不要太鲜明,各种嘲讽丑化特朗普,采访希拉里各种夸奖赞美,还要多有倾向性呢?但是你不能批评媒体不客观,这是他们的“言论自由”和“政治正确”。
关于这个电影,它所产生的真实背景,以及现在的舆论背景,都让对它的讨论不可能再是对电影的讨论了。很有意思的是,在浏览这些评论的时候,我最大的感触是对同样的一个事物,人与人之间会有多么多的不同的感受与看法。而我们每一个人在言说自己的感受时就在改变事实的真相,也许下一次的世界大战真的就是“口水战”吧。