一心想在自己的专业理论中寻找中国农村出路的金融专家芦靖生,在准备出国继续深造之际,被派到兰考县担任第一书记,与县委副书记范中州、乡书记韩素云相遇在兰考脱贫攻坚第一线。他们带领人民群众奋战三年,攻坚克难,这座半个世纪没能摆脱贫困的县城终于得以“摘帽”。影片《千顷澄碧的时代》由电影频道节目中心领衔出品,河南省委宣传部、兰考县委宣传部联合摄制,“千顷澄碧”来源于《念奴娇·追思焦裕禄》。该诗的最后一
一心想在自己的专业理论中寻找中国农村出路的金融专家芦靖生,在准备出国继续深造之际,被派到兰考县担任第一书记,与县委副书记范中州、乡书记韩素云相遇在兰考脱贫攻坚第一线。他们带领人民群众奋战三年,攻坚克难,这座半个世纪没能摆脱贫困的县城终于得以“摘帽”。影片《千顷澄碧的时代》由电影频道节目中心领衔出品,河南省委宣传部、兰考县委宣传部联合摄制,“千顷澄碧”来源于《念奴娇·追思焦裕禄》。该诗的最后一句这样写道,“绿我涓滴,会它千顷澄碧”。以涓滴之水润泽这片土地,我们会还其千顷澄碧的未来。兰考是焦裕禄精神的发祥地,“三年脱贫、七年小康”,是兰考县委、县政府立下的军令状。2014年以来,兰考县委、县政府组织动员各方面力量,开始了这场践行庄严承诺、奋力奔向小康的扶贫攻坚战。2017年3月27日,兰考县正式“摘帽”,成为河南省贫困退出机制建立后首个脱贫的贫困县。三年,在成功到来之前,日以继夜的探索和试验,永无止境的困局和挑战。这就是《千顷澄碧的时代》记录的故事。这个故事里,最可贵的,是真实和诚恳影片对扶贫落地困境的描摹生动真实,每一种困难,都是一种常见问题的浓缩典型。左也是难,右也是难;对于国家政策的探讨和解读非常诚挚,没有流于表面,每一个解决方案的过程都解释得很清楚。政府主导、银行支持、企业带动、保险加稳的“四位一体”金融扶贫模式,它是怎么在试验和失败中,不断完善的。看似无解的一盘死棋,四处是困局,如何走出新路。主旋律的故事,它无疑担负着解读、宣传国家政策的使命,这就决定了,你不能指望只是看过一场热闹就完了。它的手法不可能过于新奇、花哨和讨巧。当然,最近也有几部“很好看“的主旋律题材的商业电影(并非贬义)。巧合、离奇、单打独斗的个人英雄,大起大落的精彩故事,这些都很好。只是,这样的电影,就会很难避免悬浮感。过于偶然,就失去了普遍意义。这种悬浮感,不见得是观众的体会,但一定会是那些经历过扶贫历程的人们的感受。真实的背后,是尊重。好像芦靖生第一天上任,就在坑洼的路上摔了一身泥。扶贫不是悬浮的乌托邦,这个过程漫长枯燥,面对的是穷苦,脏乱,充满了的庸常琐屑的重复,鸡毛蒜皮的问题。一脚泥一脚水地走在阡陌之间,兰考脱贫之路才得以铺就。不是某一个扶贫干部,而是每一个扶贫干部。扶贫,不是某一个人的英雄主义,而是整个社会全方位的参与和努力才能真正实现的结果。对,没有什么“神转折“,没有奇迹,没有神来之笔。如果加上这些,未免把全国几百万长年默默坚守的扶贫干部们,看得太轻。这个故事里,最有力量的,是他们和他们片中有个情节,是芦靖生通过视频电话,向国外的女友以及女友的同学们,也就是美国研究扶贫问题的年轻学者们,介绍中国的扶贫思路和方法。这让我想到2019年关于诺贝尔经济学奖的讨论。2019年,诺贝尔经济学奖授予三位经济学家 “为减轻全球贫困所采取的实验性方法”。他们研究方向都是如何解决贫困问题,诺奖评委认为,其研究已经帮助减轻了全球贫困,并具有进一步改善地球上最贫困人口生活的巨大潜力。而他们的的核心研究成果与中国已经成功落地实现的“造血式”扶贫、“扶贫先扶志”、精准扶贫、金融扶贫等等理论不谋而合。经济学作为理论范式固然非常重要,但在扶贫这个领域中,永恒的难题是理论吗?全世界每一个国家都致力于消灭贫困,这个持久的困境,是缺少理论吗?我们的政府说:“仅仅发钱、发物资是基本没用的。要发人!”于是,成千上万的有志青年,从条件较好地区的党政机关、企事业单位走出来,去当那个“第一书记”,去做县城农村的基层干部。到2020年底,280多万扶贫干部,超过1800人,牺牲在扶贫攻坚一线。我国农村从普遍贫困走向整体消灭绝对贫困,成为首个实现联合国减贫目标的发展中国家,对全球减贫贡献超过70%。2020年,中国832个贫困县全部摘帽,全国近1亿贫困人口实现脱贫。世界银行2018年发布的《中国系统性国别诊断》报告称“中国在快速经济增长和减少贫困方面取得了‘史无前例的成就’”。并为世界提供了值得借鉴的系统性脱贫方案。是的,只有中国做到了。有人说,诺贝尔经济学家的经济学家在用理论扶贫,而我们的扶贫干部,是用生命奋战在扶贫第一线。瞬间竟然也感觉使命在肩了。这个故事里,最动人的,是浪漫和眷恋最喜欢片中很多特别漂亮的航拍,那些带着情人般爱意的镜头徐徐铺开,让人全心感受到,这片土地上正在迸发出崭新的生机,是那么明亮又欢愉,自由又丰美。1963年,41岁的焦裕禄在泡桐树前留影,他很高兴地说,“咱春天栽的泡桐苗都活了,十年后会变成一片林海。”他的生命停止在第二年,可是他种下的那些树苗,在2017年,早已蔚然成林。影片的最后,崭新的兰考,满城的泡桐树开满水彩般绮丽的淡紫色香花。芦靖生和范中州来到泡桐树下。这时,银幕上出现了1990年的影片《焦裕禄》中年轻的焦裕禄。
漫长的岁月长河,平凡的英雄们,一代接上一代。风沙、内涝、盐碱,披荆斩棘,开荒辟地的,是他们;贫穷、迷茫、困局,苦寻突破,继往开来的,是他们。昨天,他们说:“兰考人民多奇志,敢教日月换新天!”今天,他们说:“未来中国的千顷澄碧,有我的一份力量!”蜿蜒而来的黄河,听到了中华大地一代又一代英雄的誓言,它在这里转过九曲十八弯的最后一个弯道,向渤海欢腾而去。中国扶贫的战斗,终于经过了所有的考验与磨难,奏响胜利的颂歌。那些平凡的英雄,把他们的青春和生命留在了这里,他们在这里化为土壤,聚作太阳,也汇成河流。
从形式来看,与之前的《法医宋慈》纪录片不同,这部纪录片采用的是古今对照的方法。看到一半尹照判断出死因之后,戛然而止,我正意犹未尽的时候,切换到现代,用现代的手法来看古代的案子。那一刻真的很惊喜!
回归纪录片内容本身。结合古代《洗冤集录》原文来讲解古代的验尸方法,看文言文原文而不是白话文加工的内容,我还蛮喜欢这样的形式。原汁原味的感觉,很有意思。
从形式来看,与之前的《法医宋慈》纪录片不同,这部纪录片采用的是古今对照的方法。看到一半尹照判断出死因之后,戛然而止,我正意犹未尽的时候,切换到现代,用现代的手法来看古代的案子。那一刻真的很惊喜!
回归纪录片内容本身。结合古代《洗冤集录》原文来讲解古代的验尸方法,看文言文原文而不是白话文加工的内容,我还蛮喜欢这样的形式。原汁原味的感觉,很有意思。
而现代讲解了两种方法。
第一种 使用光学和扫描隧道显微镜观察淋巴结切片和炎症反应,我自己的专业正好这学期在看病理切片,专业对口了属于是。自己专业肺水肿等疾病可能会有血细胞渗出,病理切片是用来判断疾病的;而同样的血细胞渗出在这个纪录片中却是用来判断死前还是死后斩首,就有一种新鲜感。讲解案件的同时,又有知识输出,挺好的。
第二种 血液喷射痕迹 对于一个推理爱好者,这种方式确实不陌生。
暂时看了第一集还不好评分。但是个人感觉是一部可以期待的纪录片。古今对照这一点真的很喜欢。
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
王伟当年在《秦始皇》中的吕不韦不不后来《寻秦记》的郭峰差。而他在《寻秦记》中扮演的是乌应元,戏份就弱了,不及郭峰抢眼。
黑帮老大的千金被反骨仔吴镇宇凌辱,荒草地扒衣放蚂蚱撕咬,水缸杂物里的施暴,都是港产片黑白片后来喜爱用的类似狠辣招数。
万梓良在那几年红得不行。都是美女型男,还有几个配角也是老戏骨。但故事就比较套路。胡慧中当年也是个异数,一个女人硬是以霸王花、铁娇娃
王伟当年在《秦始皇》中的吕不韦不不后来《寻秦记》的郭峰差。而他在《寻秦记》中扮演的是乌应元,戏份就弱了,不及郭峰抢眼。
黑帮老大的千金被反骨仔吴镇宇凌辱,荒草地扒衣放蚂蚱撕咬,水缸杂物里的施暴,都是港产片黑白片后来喜爱用的类似狠辣招数。
万梓良在那几年红得不行。都是美女型男,还有几个配角也是老戏骨。但故事就比较套路。胡慧中当年也是个异数,一个女人硬是以霸王花、铁娇娃形象在英雄片、黑帮片、动作片江湖中杀出一条血路。
1.从事影视行业的专业人员,能把影视行业拍的这么浮夸,这么不接地气也是可以,这是在自黑吗?
2.配角,大部分的配角演技都不行,不是不在线,就是不行,只有面瘫和狰狞两种模式。
3.具体剧情有些白,无味,让人没有追下去的欲望。
4,就目前的剧集来看,高以翔的戏份非常少,还不如大部分配角多,而且有些违和,甚至可以完全剥离出来,请主创不要过多消费高先生。
<1.从事影视行业的专业人员,能把影视行业拍的这么浮夸,这么不接地气也是可以,这是在自黑吗?
2.配角,大部分的配角演技都不行,不是不在线,就是不行,只有面瘫和狰狞两种模式。
3.具体剧情有些白,无味,让人没有追下去的欲望。
4,就目前的剧集来看,高以翔的戏份非常少,还不如大部分配角多,而且有些违和,甚至可以完全剥离出来,请主创不要过多消费高先生。
5.女主表现的还可以,但是无奈剧情不行,很难发挥个人魅力。
6,整体的质感还行,画面也很舒服,算是亮点。
今年看的48部电影,富大龙老师演的真棒,那一跪,我的乖乖,这不是影帝吗!润生演的,有点走过场。剧本有点流水化作业,其它的还好,灯光摄影,看那部片子,感觉都不差。剪辑,不记得是富大龙老师,还是汪润生,自己练戏时,几个截图,看的有点尴尬!然后,最后富大龙老师给皇上表演,润生去见到了王子文,然后回来,富大龙老师才死,这样处理,感觉就有些奇怪,我感觉把润生见子文,放到最后,可能会稍微不那么尴尬。演戏
今年看的48部电影,富大龙老师演的真棒,那一跪,我的乖乖,这不是影帝吗!润生演的,有点走过场。剧本有点流水化作业,其它的还好,灯光摄影,看那部片子,感觉都不差。剪辑,不记得是富大龙老师,还是汪润生,自己练戏时,几个截图,看的有点尴尬!然后,最后富大龙老师给皇上表演,润生去见到了王子文,然后回来,富大龙老师才死,这样处理,感觉就有些奇怪,我感觉把润生见子文,放到最后,可能会稍微不那么尴尬。演戏–见子文–富大龙老师去世;演戏–富大龙老师去世–见子文;虽说给润生和子文交代了一个结尾,但是这个结尾处理的不好,不管是哪一种方式,或许,进京之前,就要让润生见子文,然后子文鼓励润生,然后富大龙老师和充满斗志的润生去北京演戏,最后富大龙老师去世,这样子,或许会稍微会好一些。由于是表现民粹的片子,所以多加一星,4颗星。
因被周刊拍到“街边接吻”的绯闻,如日中天的王牌美女主播浅川恵那事业一落千丈,被迫从黄金时段降板,多年后的2018年,已经步入30代的她沦为了一档周五夜间资讯节目的单元主持。却因同节目的年轻编导岸本拓朗的请求,卷入了一件疑似冤案的调查。
这便是《Elpis》的故事背景,也可以简单称为第一集的主要内容。看似简单的内容,却让我把第
因被周刊拍到“街边接吻”的绯闻,如日中天的王牌美女主播浅川恵那事业一落千丈,被迫从黄金时段降板,多年后的2018年,已经步入30代的她沦为了一档周五夜间资讯节目的单元主持。却因同节目的年轻编导岸本拓朗的请求,卷入了一件疑似冤案的调查。
这便是《Elpis》的故事背景,也可以简单称为第一集的主要内容。看似简单的内容,却让我把第一集来来回回看了三遍。因为虽然尽是铺垫,却没有一处废笔。
在说剧情之前,本剧的创作背景也很值得聊一聊。
【编剧渡辺あや和制作人佐野亜裕美】
早在2016年,制作人佐野亜裕美就找到编剧渡辺彩,表示想请她写一个爱情喜剧的剧本。作为一名剧作家,当时的渡边彩基本只给NHK写过剧本,虽有《康乃馨》这样优质的作品,但比起很多高产的编剧,她的作品数量只能算是寥寥。有趣的是,在爱情喜剧这个题材上,两位沟通无果,却在当今日本社会出现的报道自由,性别差异,司法制度改革的滞后,冤假错案以及对社会的忿忿上相谈甚欢。于是次年,俩人构思了Elpis这个企划,而故事的主人公浅川恵那,也是一开始就锁定了长泽雅美,并贴合她的形象进行描写创作的。
【灵感来源】
另外,与很多“本片纯属虚构,如有雷同,实属巧合不同”的剧集不同,《Elpis》的开头就出现了这么一行字“本片灵感源自多个真实存在的案件,是以此为基础而创作的虚拟作品”,片尾更是打出了九部参考文献,这在电视剧制作里堪称前所未有(至少我没见过)。这些参考文献分别是:「冤罪 ある日、私は犯人にされた」(菅家利和),「訊問の罠 足利事件の真実」(菅家利和、佐藤博史),「殺人犯はそこにいる 隠蔽された北関東連続幼女誘拐殺人事件」(清水潔),「足利事件 冤罪を証明した一冊のこの本」(小林篤),「刑事弁護の技術と倫理 刑事弁護の心?技?体」(佐藤博史),「冤罪 足利事件『らせんの真実』を追った400日」(下野新聞社編集局 編),「東電OL殺人事件」(佐野眞一),「偽りの記憶『本庄保険金殺人事件』の真相」(高野隆、松山馨、山本宜成、鍛冶伸明),「21世紀の再審 えん罪被害者の速やかな救済のために」(日本弁護士連合会人権擁護委員会編)仅仅丛书名便可知道,“足利事件”应该就是本剧参考的真实事件中最主要的一个案件。
【足利事件】
“足利事件”发生在1990年。当时日本枥木县足利市一名4岁的女童失踪,后在附近的河岸上发现了她的尸体。经过一年多的调查,一名叫菅家利和的幼儿园校车司机在DNA和招供的双重证据下,被判无期徒刑。尽管曾一度招工,菅家利和却在第一次公开审讯时开始,主张自己无罪,经过长达几十年的再上诉以及DNA的在鉴定,2009年,菅家利和无罪释放。2010年再审结果,判定菅家利和无罪。菅家利和的父亲深受打击,在儿子被捕后不久就去世了。一直相信儿子无辜的母亲也在他被释放的两年前去世了。
围绕本案的日本警方搜查逼供,刑事,司法手续等都受到了极大的抨击,而这件冤案能够翻盘的关键,正是媒体。日本电视台2008年针对足利事件做了专题报道,并指出了DNA鉴定和菅家利和口供中的多处疑点,强烈要求有再次做DNA鉴定的必要。这个专题报道,在此后很长时间都做了循环放松,而报道的记者,正是报道过《 桶川跟踪狂杀人事件 》的清水潔。
【回归本剧角色】
本剧中由长泽雅美扮演的主角恵那已经是一个丧失了所有欲望的人。她和一同被拍到的男友正一分手,面对职场的性骚扰和霸凌视若无睹,家中极简到空空如也,打开冰箱除了功能果冻就只剩下水,即便如此,她还是睡不好觉,每一次进食还是会让发她感到恶心。这一切的根由还有那句“我要死了”究竟是事实还是比喻,也许还要在后面的故事中才能辨明。
雄霸之子二号眞栄田郷敦演了一个极其讨人厌的普信男——岸本拓朗。尽管父亲早逝,但年收过亿的大律师母亲,足以让他从小就衣食无忧。即便只是一个低收视率的综艺编导,他也依旧自我感觉良好,被抓住把柄不得不去调查冤案时,还会冠冕堂皇地装作是与生俱来的正义感。一旦发现这是一潭水自己这样的小喽啰不可以去趟的浑水时,他的怯懦和丑态,让人不齿。
和她同时被拍到的另一位当事人,前男友斎藤正一在和惠那分手后,不仅事业没有影响,更是平步青云,成了电视台的王牌,更是官邸的首席记者。在与拓郎惠那三人讨论案件调查方向时,导演极其巧妙地旋转运镜,尽管正一如今风生水起自信满满,言语间也似乎在和惠那交流,却一秒也没敢和惠那眼神交流。除开感情,他衔接了最重要的一环就是时任副总理的大门雄二——他曾经是警察厅的长官。冤案一旦确定,他自然也会牵扯其中。
本片最关键的引子,是化妆师Cherry。她中学时期因不堪母亲同居男友的虐待离家出走。被好心的工人大叔松本良夫收留,却成了松本良夫就是诱杀少女罪犯的佐证。多年来她一直想要帮助大叔证明清白,在电视台工作也许就是这个目的。
除去以上几位主要角色,总制作人村井也是一个让我印象深刻的角色。他形容自己制作的节目《Friday BonBon》就是牛肉饭上的红姜,酒店里的大浴场,附带的话挺高兴,没它也无所谓,简而言之,可有可无。尽管如今的他只是一个只会职场性骚扰和霸凌的烂人。但他曾经是新闻节目《NEWS8》的负责人。
【一些感慨】
近几年我观影感受最好的,是一部意大利影片。那是我在视频网站无意点开的一部外语片,主角我一个都不认识,故事简介我也没看。一切剧情发展都在我的意料之外。然而在讯息如此发达的现在,想要找一部一无所知的影片,实在是太难了。因此面对本季我期待值最高的日剧——《Elpis》,我除了CAST以外,在观剧前没有看任何的相关报道和介绍。在没有任何预设的情况下看完第一集,收获的是慢慢的惊喜。随后再去看主创的访谈和背景调查,更是大为感动。
剧中除去冤案,女性的职场环境也叫我颇为触动。过了三十岁,一说身体不适,就会被吐槽是不是更年期到了。吃青春饭的背景板小艺人,面对职场的骚扰,不是立马反抗,而是偷偷录音用作将来万一自己被辞退时要挟电视台的资本...
在演员的表现方面,长泽雅美在剧中工作状态和生活状态的切换堪称完美。作为主播时的播音腔,无论是停顿还是音色都给我一种专业主播的感觉。而在Friday BonBon里播报的状态又和当年播报新闻时,截然不同。麻酱现在真是一位超赞的女演员。
雄霸二子的乡敦完美演绎了一个讨人嫌的角色;铃木亮平的前男友和麻酱真是配一脸,他这几年真是越来越帅气了;三浦透子去年出演的《驾驶我的车》大获好评,只是我还没看过,所以对她也不甚了解;三浦贵大,你胖了...
今晚就要播第二集了,待我细细品完接着说。
主演们总叨叨说THE KING是要多看几遍的电影,虽然第一遍的时候……确实有点闷了,不过还是细刷了第二遍,竟然有意思很多。理解了一些宣传时的点,大概还有韩在林导演的一些想法,所以整理一下自己看到的THE KING。
主演们总叨叨说THE KING是要多看几遍的电影,虽然第一遍的时候……确实有点闷了,不过还是细刷了第二遍,竟然有意思很多。理解了一些宣传时的点,大概还有韩在林导演的一些想法,所以整理一下自己看到的THE KING。
评分好低,但是我却哭得死去活来。跟妈妈的对话那段,妈妈不知道一个人怎么养活你,但是妈妈很庆幸生下了你,看到你谈恋爱,失恋难过。我幸好生下了你,一定要记住妈妈跟你的这次对话,因为妈妈爱你。真是泪奔了。。。。还有跟她那个卵子对话,现在很多女孩子打胎,流产。都是一个生命,他们还没有出生感受一下风的感觉,牵手的感觉就被流产掉了。那段卵子对话也是让我泪奔。。还有林依晨跟卵子对话的那一些也很感人。。。。
评分好低,但是我却哭得死去活来。跟妈妈的对话那段,妈妈不知道一个人怎么养活你,但是妈妈很庆幸生下了你,看到你谈恋爱,失恋难过。我幸好生下了你,一定要记住妈妈跟你的这次对话,因为妈妈爱你。真是泪奔了。。。。还有跟她那个卵子对话,现在很多女孩子打胎,流产。都是一个生命,他们还没有出生感受一下风的感觉,牵手的感觉就被流产掉了。那段卵子对话也是让我泪奔。。还有林依晨跟卵子对话的那一些也很感人。。。。
前几集,只要有叶凝芝和魏广在,画面都很温馨,果然爱情就是这样,只是待在一起都很甜蜜
凝芝对魏广的喜欢真的是很单纯了,就是希望魏广能得到重用,施展自己的才华和抱负
凝芝为了能让魏广当上征东大元帅可以说是不遗余力了,魏广能有凝芝这样的支持真是太幸福了
魏广之于凝芝,就是平凡生活里突然照进的一束光吧,这么美好的人突然闯进自己的生活,很开心了
前几集,只要有叶凝芝和魏广在,画面都很温馨,果然爱情就是这样,只是待在一起都很甜蜜
凝芝对魏广的喜欢真的是很单纯了,就是希望魏广能得到重用,施展自己的才华和抱负
凝芝为了能让魏广当上征东大元帅可以说是不遗余力了,魏广能有凝芝这样的支持真是太幸福了
魏广之于凝芝,就是平凡生活里突然照进的一束光吧,这么美好的人突然闯进自己的生活,很开心了
魏广昏迷凝芝紧张的样子真的打动我了,这一对之间的感情实在是很真挚了,太感人了
魏广和凝芝第一次接吻的时候真的甜哭我了,这对cp的爱情也太美好了吧,真是让人想都不敢想啊
能把凝芝宠成这样也只有魏广了无论凝芝做什么魏广都支持,而且总是会担心凝芝的安慰,好感动
把空气留给凝芝呼吸,放弃自己的生命,魏广对凝芝也太好了,这一段我直接泪目
爱一个人就是要把她给宠上天,魏广对凝芝就是这样的,感觉凝芝都要被魏广宠坏了,好幸福啊
为了魏广能完成自己的夙愿,凝芝想尽了办法,果然爱一个人就是希望他开心啊,魏广很幸运能遇见凝芝
这是一部通过手绘风格动画和实拍回访表现的反战纪录片,这种动画纪录片的呈现方式不算是首开先河,在它之前,有「北方的纳努克」、「和巴什尔跳华尔兹」等,但以其在戛纳电影节斩获多项大奖来看,可以说是在视觉奇观化、影像感染力、社会批判性方面较为成功的范例。
本文不对背景和情节作过多赘述(因为是历史盲)。故事主线从一名波
这是一部通过手绘风格动画和实拍回访表现的反战纪录片,这种动画纪录片的呈现方式不算是首开先河,在它之前,有「北方的纳努克」、「和巴什尔跳华尔兹」等,但以其在戛纳电影节斩获多项大奖来看,可以说是在视觉奇观化、影像感染力、社会批判性方面较为成功的范例。
本文不对背景和情节作过多赘述(因为是历史盲)。故事主线从一名波兰的战地记者卡普钦斯基展开,当时正值美苏冷战白热化阶段,西非国家安哥拉也成了国际势力抗衡的牺牲品,卡普钦斯基为了让安哥拉——这个几乎被炮火摧毁的主要战场——的声音被全世界听到,只身前往战争最前线,不想却改变了历史的进程。
我只说一个有意思的点。
当时的安哥拉解放内战由两个阵营组成,分别是苏联、古巴支持的“安人运”和美国支持的“安盟”,二者的语言略有不同,只要开口就表明政治了立场,局势的紧张程度可想而知,当地人甚至打个招呼都会被枪毙,在卡普钦斯基南下的途中,尸体是路边最常见的“风景”。见图1~3,这是一个中弹的安哥拉人,但让人费解的是,临死前的他,不是求救,不是呻吟,而是乞求战地记者为他拍照。更让人费解的是,他不是个例,卡普钦斯基回忆道,“他们都想让我拍照,为了留下痕迹,以另一种方式继续存在”。至此,这位伟大的战地记者便下定决心,要让这里的人们“永远存活”(一个伏笔)。
前两季都是5星。这季必须只能给3星。苹果的政治正确虽迟但到,一定可以恶心到你。
总统是女性,NASA总指挥官是女性,火星任务的commander也得是女性。確實是玩得有点过了。
尤其是这个commander的角色,黑人女性Daniel Poole(被Ed提携然后
前两季都是5星。这季必须只能给3星。苹果的政治正确虽迟但到,一定可以恶心到你。
总统是女性,NASA总指挥官是女性,火星任务的commander也得是女性。確實是玩得有点过了。
尤其是这个commander的角色,黑人女性Daniel Poole(被Ed提携然后强行机械降神),几个航天人中最不喜欢的一个。当然女总统Ellen,和NASA总指挥Margo(被Von Braun赏识,然后背刺Von Braun,最后也是踩着Von Braun的研究成果上位),也不太容易喜欢起来,但也勉强可以接受。
这个Poole就很过分了。编剧必须要强行送她挂。她第一次当月球任务的commander,就是9年没执行过任务,Ed想给她次机会。9年没有飞过的她,也好意思直接走进办公室打种族牌,强行要当Commander。任何merit-based的决策系统都会觉得你他妈逗我。但Ed还是愿意给她一个机会,让她当了Commander。
这一季中,她被Margo用奇葩的理由送上commander的位置,还好意思认为自己是earned it。到了NASA要强行提前登陆火星任务时间线的时候,奇迹般地一切顺利。飞在太空中又机械降神来了个太阳翼。反正就是能帮到黑人女commander,之前铺垫的所有NASA体系的臃肿什么的都不重要呗?
最后,Helios的飞船提前数日到达火星上方,又强行开挂送来一场沙尘暴。而最后一秒,又强行开挂让沙尘暴正好在Poole来到的时候停止。苹果出品的政治正确,真的过分恶心。即使是这么出彩的一部剧。
可能是编剧也想戏虐一下人生无常吧。这也是Ed职业生涯的最后一飞。旧时的噩梦,阿波罗10号没有第一个登月的遗憾,还要伴随他终生。为了捧这个黑人女commander,这个遗憾对于从第一季开始陪伴我们的这个开拓者的角色而言,确实太残忍了。
Von Braun,Deke,Gordo,Ed,Molly,所有的开拓者们都不能算是功德圆满。而这个Daniel Poole,女总统和NASA的女负责人,一路开挂,反而喜提功与名。一路以来所面对的,所战胜的,以及所没有战胜的,都远不及真正的开拓者们。却是在开拓者们的保护和牺牲下,才成长起来,最后功德圆满的却是这些温室里的公主?
同为女性的Molly,也可以算是不得善终。究其原因,恐怕是因为她也是开拓者阵营。
不知道苹果在这里宣扬的是一种怎么样的精神。可以说是完全偏离了第一二季的那种来自人性底层的自我实现和超越的精神。
仿佛变成了建制派的赞歌,也有可能是对现状的一种唏嘘。可是在戏外,政治正确和建制派在做成事情这件事上,就是被吊打的存在。SpaceX把NASA打得落花流水。然后民主党疯狂拿马斯克调戏女下属,致很多女下属怀孕做文章。马斯克直接表示fuxk off。
本以为难得看见一部不再脑残、不再宣扬襁褓中的绵羊精神的闹剧(政治正确的本质,就是抓小放大,将温室里的人强行送上台前。因为政治正确是the easy way。看看拜登和他的副总统吧)。没想到你苹果还是你苹果。文艺作品如果继续被锁死在政治正确的精神封印中,开拓者精神永远不会回归。以上。
Do not go gentle into that dark night.
五个月实践追完了第一季到第五季之后,发现这部剧其实是一部男主的成长剧,第一季路西法逃离地狱来到洛杉矶这座城市时还是地狱之王,在和克洛伊在一起办案的过程中,两人从各种猜忌到怀疑之后,最终到第五季时候路西法终于对克洛伊说出了“I love you",而后重生得到众天使的跪拜成为新的God。
五个月实践追完了第一季到第五季之后,发现这部剧其实是一部男主的成长剧,第一季路西法逃离地狱来到洛杉矶这座城市时还是地狱之王,在和克洛伊在一起办案的过程中,两人从各种猜忌到怀疑之后,最终到第五季时候路西法终于对克洛伊说出了“I love you",而后重生得到众天使的跪拜成为新的God。
其中有个对路西法帮助很重要的角色就是琳达,不仅是路西法,你会发现剧中经常出现的人物,小恶魔、阿曼迪尔、克洛伊等等,都会隔段时间出现在琳达的咨询室里或者生活里,她甚至是整部剧里第一个真正意义上知道路西法是地狱之王的人类,而路西法也在每次遇到和兄弟们的糟心事,以及和克洛伊的感情问题的时候都会来到琳达这里,然后在当集的案件里收获实践的反馈。
刚开始那几季,印象最深的就是路西法时常暴怒于Father的操控,或者是他自认为的操控,甚至一度苦恼于克洛伊是上帝送来人类世界给他的标配,而不是他内心里真正的爱的对象,这也成为路西法和克洛伊两个人在感情上的阻碍。
在下地狱这件事里,什么样的人会上天堂,什么样的人会下地狱,本质上不在于真正意义上做了好事还是坏事,而在于内心里是否有罪恶感,而这罪恶感会成为一轮轮在地狱里折磨人的场景,折磨着地狱里人。
在第五季最后一集的时候,路西法在天堂看到了原本在地狱的”Mr Said Out Bitch",而“说脏话先生”说他接受了路西法的建议,直面了家人和自己的罪恶,这样他打开那扇门之后来到了天堂,从这个角度来说,每个接纳了真实自我的人都会从地狱里来到天堂。克洛伊被刺,弥留之际她告诉路西法她的死不是路西法的错,是她自己的选择来到当下的地方,让路西法放下对她死亡的罪恶感,克洛伊自己也放下了对丹死亡的罪恶感,这让她去了天堂里。
在丹死掉的那一集里,阿曼迪尔去天堂确认了下,发现那么多人都喜欢的丹却没有在天堂,其实在第一季里就看得出来,丹不是那种没有污点的警察,而丹之所以在克洛伊手下做事情也是因为犯了错被降职。丹那会应该在地狱里在接受着一次又一次看似来自地狱,实则来自内心的折磨,也就是来自于丹自己内心的罪恶感,让他在地狱的轮回里遭受着折磨。
在路西法重生之后,他拿着焰火之剑砍掉了迈克的翅膀,而不是直接要了他的命,作为地狱之王的他都能获得第二次机会,他也给了在剧里看着让人牙痒痒的迈克第二次机会。
路西法是因为为了配上克洛伊的爱而参与了战争,也因为了有更广义上的爱配得了新God的位置。虽然后续又看到其他剧评说天使是不能成为上帝,只能是天使和人类结合的人类才能成为上帝,极大可能是剧里的查理,但是这不妨碍整部剧到第五季结束时候的happy ending,让我一度认为已经是大结局了,没想到还有第六季。
不管怎样,整部剧到第五季的时候,男主的内心世界都是处在不断升级打怪,升华自我境界的主线上,并且因此获得了大爱,从这个维度上来说,到第五季已经可以算是圆满,后面的一季就当是甜点吧!