Richard Jewell Trailer From Eastwood Looks Good

The trailer to the upcoming film "Richard Jewell" hit the Internet last week, and in just a few days the two-minute clip from Warner Bros. racked up a half-million views via official channels and movie fan sites. Check out the tension-building intro here:

This first glimpse at Clint Eastwood's 38th directing gig is void of many surprises, but it does reveal a few details not yet widely reported for the film.

First, it appears the score to "Richard Jewell" may be composed by Arturo Sandoval, the jazz musician who provided original works for Eastwood's most recent feature "The Mule." Sounds good.

Second, the narrative -- at least as presented by "Richard Jewell Official Trailer" No. 1 -- seems to remain in step with its source material, the Marie Brenner article for Vanity Fair magazine. Potential props to screenwriter Billy Ray for resisting a fictionalized drama as seen in other Eastwood "based on a true story" narratives. The explosion filmed at Centennial Olympic Park this summer is convincing!

Third, Kathy Bates, Olivia Wilde, John Hamm and Sam Rockwell each brought their A-game to their roles. I can hardly wait to see how they deliver the goods as Jewell's mother, reporter, investigator and attorney, respectively.

And finally, it seems the actor in the title role, Paul Walter Hauser, is made for the part, more so than Jonah Hill, the Oscar nominee originally slated to don Jewell's security gear (Hill is now a producer). Though convincing in "Moneyball" and other dramatic roles, he's perhaps too good looking for this one!

Audiences will recognize Hauser for two prior roles, including one as heavy on the Olympic relevance, starting with 2017's "I, Tonya," in which he portrayed Tonya Harding's bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt.

More recently he effectively portrayed a witless Colorado Springs hater in Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman."

Hauser's close-up mug appears repeatedly in the "Richard Jewell" trailer and he is convincing as the real-life Jewell who appeared on "SNL" and many other TV broadcasts of 1996 to the early 2000s, when he was finally exonerated.

The trailer also gives prominence to an off-screen villain, Eric Rudolph, who on July 27, 1996, uttered the eerie phrase to a 9-1-1 operator from a downtown Atlanta payphone:

"There's a bomb in Centennial Park ... you have thirty minutes!" 

In the video, Hamm as FBI investigator and Hauser as Jewell state this sentence a combined eight times, with an ascending intensity that crescendos to match Rudolph's actual recorded creepiness.

Punctuating the trailer, I like the tag line presented before the film's credit list:

THE WORLD WILL KNOW HIS NAME

AND THE TRUTH

Which brings me to a curiosity of the trailer: portrayal of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom.

In addition to a fictional news editor with a made-up name plate (verified in an email I exchanged with the real AJC Olympic editor of the day), there's a made-up version of the iconic "It's Atlanta!" front page dated September 18, 1990.

Why the Eastwood prop team included a 2019 photo of Midtown Atlanta in their mocked-up news page baffles me. The other headlines on the dummy newspaper also have no resemblance to the actual page announcing when Atlanta won its Olympic bid.

These are minor details. Big picture, one hopes the film otherwise sticks to the facts when it hits theatres on December 13.

Photos via this Collider.com report, which credits the images to Claire Folger/Warner Bros., except for the image of the clip board, which appeared on CineReflex without photo credit (possibly a still grabbed from the trailer). The image of Olivia Wilde with framed newspaper is a screen grab from the "Richard Jewell" Official Trailer on YouTube via Warner Bros.