Forgoing Myths of Earlier Films, Clint Eastwood Directs [Mostly] True Story of ’96 Olympic Hero

When the film “Richard Jewell” opens at theatres next month, audiences may enter the experience informed by the Warner Bros. tag line: The World Will Know His Name And The Truth.

When moviegoers exit the two-hour-nine-minute drama—stylishly directed by Clint Eastwood—ticket holders will be mulling over a mostly factual version of the Centennial Olympic Park security guard’s life before, during and after the ’96 Games of Atlanta. 

Jewell gets a fair treatment in this portrayal sure to aptly tilt the narrative to the ‘hero’ end of the opinion spectrum. He saved countless lives July 27, 1996, and deserves this history-correcting dramatization for a humble Georgia do-gooder whom heroically "done good."

“Richard Jewell” is a great film, built upon a solid foundation of heavily researched source material and adorned with many merits. 

Its solid cast and acting, strong writing, impactful scenes with attention to detail (though not always historically accurate), and a soothing albeit minimalist soundtrack combine for an entertaining photoplay sure to get folks talking.

Screenwriter Billy Ray relied heavily on Marie Brenner’s Vanity Fair 1997 article on Jewell, which will soon be reappear in a Simon & Schuster-published collection of the reporter's works timed for release with the film. 

Ray also pulled countless details from the new Abrams Press book “The Suspect” by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen (reviewed here).

With these and other factually rich and thoroughly vetted sources in Ray’s reach, it is curious, but not entirely surprising, the screenwriter embellished some facts and rearranged the timeline “for dramatic effect” in his creative process. More about that later in this review, and in this “Richard Jewell: Fact vs. Fiction” summary (beware of spoilers in both posts).

Accuracy debates aside, is “Richard Jewell” destined for awards nominations? Absolutely.

Will it win a bevy of these honors? Maybe.

Leonardo DiCaprio, an executive producer on “Richard Jewell” originally envisioned for the attorney role later filled by Sam Rockwell, may prove a topsy-turvy awards rival via “One Upon A Time … In Hollywood.” 

I cannot help but think 2019 blockbusters “Us” or “The Joker” and “Ad Astra” would sideline this five-ringed film in several categories, but Eastwood could be a home run candidate for “Best Director.” With that stated, even the film "Booksmart" (directed by Olivia Wilde, a star in "Richard Jewell") may outsmart Eastwood as the awards season unfolds. 

When compared with Clint’s other directorial works, “Richard Jewell” deserves placement in the top ten, maybe even the top five, but not as the crown of his long list of his many achievements. 

“Richard Jewell” does mark a return to Eastwood greatness not seen since “Million Dollar Baby” and “Mystic River,” but still plays loose with facts (as mentioned above), including some Olympic details, as in his more recent “American Sniper.”

Regardless of its rank in the Eastwood cannon, I enjoyed “Richard Jewell” and found it a powerful film, providing a thick and flavorful steak for audiences to dissect and savor. The film proves informative for all ticket holders, whether they were part of the Atlanta Games or learning about the park-related events for the first time.

On some fronts, “Richard Jewell” is a thriller, but like other Eastwood-directed films, inclusive of slow burns punctuated by occasional moments of intensity, which I think will resonate with a wide audience.

In the title role, Paul Walter Hauser vividly and effectively portrays the anti-machismo of Jewell, whose idiosyncrasies may one day resonate like the title character of “The Outlaw Josey Wales" or any one of the Western’s quirkier roles. It is fun to see Hauser in the lead on the heels of his cameo in “BlacKkKlansman.”

Perhaps prophetically for Hauser, a Jay Leno one-liner about the real guard-turned-suspect proved predictive about the actor. In 1996, the comedian joked that Jewell resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s fumbling attacker, a role Hauser brought to life as Shawn Eckhardt in “I, TONYA.” “What is it about the Olympic Games that brings out big, fat, stupid guys?” quipped Leno. 

Hauser plays it big and smart. 

Another key “Richard Jewell” strength is the film’s very authentic recreation of Centennial Olympic Park as it appeared during Games time. Little touches, like kids playing in the Olympic Rings fountain and huddled around a bag of lapel pins for trading, made me smile.

On a more somber note, the countdown to the explosion is one of the best scenes in any Clint Eastwood film, or any recent action film period. The arresting detonation feels real and the Dolby surround-sound and visuals left my heart pounding while my breath involuntarily joined the audible gasp filling the packed theatre. The blast had a way of making the audience jump as they did when Anne Archer uncapped a boiling pot of water in “Fatal Attraction.”

I liked that in lieu of gore, Eastwood and editors showed the injured bombing victims, and emergency workers tending to them, in a tasteful and artistic manner. There’s a personal moment with the mortally wounded Alice Hawthorne, the bomb’s lone fatality, but no mention of a Turkish camera operator who died of a heart attack on the scene.

Pooling blood, oozed into engraved names on Olympic park bricks, leaves no doubt how much worse the attack could have been if not for Jewell and other guards’ brave and swift response.  

Moments earlier, audiences are introduced to an FBI agent (Jon Hamm), as well as the tough-as-nails chain-smoking crime reporter for the hometown Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Kathy Scruggs (Wilde), who has all the moxie of Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane with blond hair, a taste for bourbon and a head-turning frankness that rubbed many the wrong way.

Sidebar: In “The Suspect,” colleagues and family share a more balanced view of Scruggs, taken at times to a crass extreme on screen, perhaps the Achilles’ heel of this otherwise great film.

From the morning after the explosion, the film quickly unleashes the fury of the FBI and media attention that overtook the Jewell household—Richard lived with his mother, Bobi (Kathy Bates)—after Scruggs got the Olympic-sized scoop from a source naming Richard the prime suspect.

Controversial and heavy-handed maneuvers by federal investigators, and the world’s media, foreshadow the worst versions of social media hurricanes to which the world’s grown accustomed.  

On the lighter side, the film also offers many subtle and surprise laughs, and the portrayal of Nadya (Nina Arianda), the Russian-born assistant to one of Jewell's attorneys, and their flirtatious banter got the loudest chuckles (unexpected fun, yes / неожиданное веселье, да). 

Some may wonder whether Mars, Inc., payed for product placement of Snickers candy bars, which often provided comic relief that satisfies. Perhaps the best line arrives as a reference to, or later resolution of, the film's own version of a quid pro quo.

There are tender moments of Jewell the individual and of Jewell with his mother, or his attorney (Sam Rockwell, performing a mash up of multiple real-life attorneys blended by Ray). I don’t think these are Oscar-level performance for Bates or Rockwell, but both play it strong, lending depth to what Eastwood described as “the perfect cast” during his remarks before the lights dimmed at the world premiere (more about the scene at AFI Fest in this post).

This is not the first Eastwood film in which the screenwriter took liberties with facts, inserting some five-ringed fiction during the creative writing process. For "American Sniper" there was no 'Olympic shooter from Syria' (a fact verified in writing, debunking Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall, creating the most popular topic in 10 years of writing this blog).

“Richard Jewell” plays it loose with its timeline, but mostly about Scruggs. For instance, according to scenes in "The Suspect" Jewell and his lawyers only met the reporter in years-later legal proceedings, never through impromptu visits to the newsroom, obviously added for dramatic embellishment.

The film is loosest when portraying tactics Scruggs used for reporting and getting 'the scoop' involving Jewell. Did she trade sex for the source of a suspect in real life? Probably not. 

Regardless, a steamy bar scene for Wilde and Hamm likely (and unfairly) will lead many to that conclusion.

I am eager to screen “Richard Jewell” again soon (for this critic, an eagerness to quickly repeat a screening is the fifth tenet of a great film after acting, writing, impact and soundtrack) to see if the world premiere version included the complete score composed by Arturo Sandoval, who previously collaborated with Eastwood for "The Mule."

Unlike other music-rich Eastwood releases, the Nov. 20 version of “Richard Jewell,” which may have been only hours old from a near final edit, had such a sparse soundtrack, I cannot help but wonder if more score will be added before the Dec. 13 worldwide release.

With all due respect to Kenny Rogers and Los del Río, whose respective hits “The Gambler” and “Macarena” appear in early Centennial Olympic Park scenes, the soundtrack is otherwise so minimalist the Sandoval music seemed barely there until the final credits.

Some lucky Atlantans will get an advance peek at "Richard Jewell" when its local premiere takes place Dec. 10. 

For everyone else looking for a great film, mark calendars for Dec. 13, when the world will at last enjoy a (re-)introduction to an unsung Olympic hero. 

First image via Avcesar.com from their trailer screen grab via Warner Bros. All other images from various websites which enjoyed access I don't have to the media log-in pages of Warner Bros. (in spite of multiple requests via their press office pages). 

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. 

Clint Eastwood Crew Films Family Jewell In Atlanta

Olympic park/Eastwood mash up image via JoBlo.com

For film buffs and Atlanta residents, summer headlines about Warner Bros. casting a new feature based on Richard Jewell may be old news.

For those further afield, the following roundup includes updates and photos from the set of the upcoming movie centered on the hero of the July 1996 Olympic Park bombing.

Hopefully a detail or two may also serve as informative updates for local readers.

I enjoy Clint Eastwood, a longtime favorite of this writer, equally for his behind-the-camera work and for original characters he created as an actor.

His film career spanning seven decades seldom includes five-ringed themes, but that's quickly changing with Eastwood directing a new picture based on the 1997 Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner titled "American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell," about which I first posted details in 2015.

At that time, Jonah Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio were set to star as the 1996 Olympic park security guard hero-turned-bombing suspect and one of his attorneys, respectively.

Consider me anxious -- for nearly four years and counting -- to experience this film.

For context: Getty Images photo of bomb investigation site taken July 27, 1996

Thanks to an online post by a fellow writer, earlier this month while my girlfriend visited from Russia, we enjoyed an extended peek at one of the Atlanta sets created for the film. For almost a week, Centennial Olympic Park's north end served as a closed set for Eastwood's team.

We snapped two night photos and several daytime images, sprinkled about this post (though not one is worth a thousand words in this case).

The image at right, for instance, offers a little taste of the set designers' take on Atlanta's "look of the Games" complete with an original Olympic torch logo created for the film.

More on what we learned around the site, where one overnight sequence involved detonating noisy pyrotechnics, follows later in this post, but first a bit more recent background.

During spring 2019, online sources said Eastwood reconfirmed involvement with the project in May, a cast was locked in within weeks, and shooting began in July. As of two weeks ago filming remained underway at multiple locations across Atlanta, with reported sightings of cast and crew both downtown and the city's upscale Buckhead district.

Paul Walter Hauser landed the title role. Some may recall his Olympic-tethered scenes in "I, Tonya" with pivotal action (sans Nancy Kerrigan knee-bashing gear) set inside Decatur's local favorite Asian restaurant, The Golden Buddha.

Paul Walter Hauser in "I, Tonya"

There's definitely a Hauser resemblance to Richard Jewell in other "I, Tonya" scenes as well.

Richard isn't the only Jewell family member who'll appear in Eastwood's project. Misery loves company as Kathy Bates signed on in (what I guess to be) a supporting role as Bobi Jewell, the security guard's mother with whom he resided, and endured throngs of media staked out at their apartment, when their lives were upended.

The film also stars Olivia Wilde as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter whose cover story about the bombing investigation put Jewell in a global spotlight, while Jon Hamm will don, er, drape the shoes and uniform of Tom Shaw, possibly a pseudonym for Georgia Bureau of Investigation officer Tom Davis, who helped Jewell to relocate bystanders before Eric Rudolph's pipe bomb detonated.

Sam Rockwell stars as Richard's criminal attorney Watson Bryant. It remains unclear whether Jewell's libel attorney, who made a name for himself by representing pariah clients, will be portrayed.

Now back to the local sets for the film.

In Centennial Olympic Park, Eastwood's crew built a replica of the AT&T stage, sound/lighting tower and concert area that operated in the summer of 1996. As a one-time Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games employee who watched the stage's original construction from the lunch room balcony of The INFORUM (ACOG's headquarters), no matter the angle the modern rebuild looked authentic.

From our western-edge vantage to view filming, we noted some of the finer details of the set, such as the mock Atlanta Olympic banners donning many stage elements.

In the rain, when some extras retreated to a staff tent and others stopped along the fence line to visit with non-cast friends, we noted their costumes included Olympic-branded gear with logos that matched the banners (both are of mock logos, not the actual AGOG trademarks and rings).

Nice touches, right down to the security guard pith helmets and baseball caps.

According to the Vanity Fair article, on the evening of July 26, 1996, a band named Jack Mack and the Heart Attack was playing just before the bomb exploded. We neither saw nor heard any music, as the evening of our scouting they were already filming post-explosion emergency response.











We also saw no EMT vehicles in scenes being filmed at night, but the following afternoon we spotted ambulances and police cruisers circa 1996 (or at least dressed to resemble the era) parked on the set as well. The blue pickup truck has a resemblance to Richard Jewell's personal vehicle, and the FBI investigations van (see photo) also looked "real" in broad daylight.

The centerpiece of the set was a recreation of the sound tower including a park bench like the one under which the original Jewell discovered Rudolph's backpack.

The set designers really nailed it (no pun intended) with "the look" of the damaged tower as it appeared during the 1996 investigation and as the park reopened with Ambassador Andrew Young leading the ceremony all those years ago.

A security guard hired for the film set informed us that the mock bombing, which took place in the middle of the night, brought at least one disgruntled hotel guest to the set to express her frustration for getting jarred out of bed without warning.

I am really curious who created the Olympic sport pictograms that decorated the set, and would love to know who was involved with the fictional XXVI Games banners. The color schemes are this close to authentic. Too bad, but the costume designer did not resurrect the brown skorts donned by summer of '96 female volunteers ... well, not "too bad," actually (they were terrible).

Our study of the set gave me hope Eastwood is committed to creating an authentic audience experience.

Reflecting on "The Ballad of Richard Jewell" article and its conversion for the screen, taken on by Billy Ray of "The Hunger Games" and "Flightplan" fame, I admit to biting my nails about the screenwriter taking liberties with Olympic facts as did the scribe for an earlier Eastwood film.

In 2014, Eastwood and Jason Hall -- screenwriter for "American Sniper" -- played fast and loose with five-ringed details, inspiring the most-read post on this blog (and the second-most read) in which the facts about an "Olympic sniper from Syria" are verified by the Arab state's national Olympic committee (there was no such character in real life).

For the Jewell feature, it's been reported the 2019 AT&T stage set included an actor portraying Kenny Rogers, the Georgia-based singer who did perform in the park in 1996 but, according to the Vanity Fair article, appeared in concert earlier in the week (not the bombing eve).

One wonders: when the final cut hits theatres, will Rogers show up in place of Jack Mack and the Heart Attack during the climactic bombing scene Eastwood & Co. recreated?

I am eager to see how and whether other International Olympic Committee, ACOG or USOPC (then USOC) players may show up in Eastwood's picture. For instance, an archived joint press conference hosted by the IOC, ACOG and FBI includes officials who are potentially quotable in Ray's screenplay, but only the FBI official is listed in IMDB.

Olympian Janet Evans appeared in explosion footage during a live interview that took place on the fateful night -- no listing for her portrayal in Eastwood's film, however.

And though the recreated AT&T stage includes several NBC affiliate studio spaces branded on the set, there are no IMDB-listed credits for cast members portraying NBC, CNN nor other national network reporters who covered the bombing and investigation.

As of this post, the only exception found in IMBD is a cast listing for an actor portraying Bryant Gumbel, who interviewed Jewell in the latter months of 1996, according to Vanity Fair.

It's my understanding "The Ballad of Richard Jewell" filming remains underway in Atlanta. I'll be on the lookout for signs with the production code "KIKI" and post updates as additional details emerge (please share via comments if you have them -- would love to hear from the extras selected for the film).

Photos by Nicholas Wolaver and Valentian Kucheriavenko except the movie still of Hauser from "I, Tonya" via Neon; top image of Eastwood via this site; Getty Images photo of bombing investigation at sunrise 7/27/1996 via this CNN archive link.