EAST HAMPTON, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 11: David Nugent, Jennifer Ash Rudick, Aengus James, Mark Landsman ... [+]
“This is a bad time not just for the press, but it’s a bad time for the truth,” proclaims Carl Bernstein at the beginning of Scandalous, a new documentary detailing the history of the National Enquirer.
The film was shown at this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival, the 27th year the festival has brought Oscar-caliber movies to the East End. Jennifer Ash Rudick, who was one of the producers of Scandalous, arranged for a group to attend the movie and a reception afterwards.
The story is fascinating. Purchased by Generoso Pope Jr. in 1952, The National Enquirer sought to sensationalize news stories to make them irresistible to housewives in America. Pope arranged for his paper to be available at grocery checkouts, which was unheard of before. The articles written were all true, they were just exaggerations of the truth, words taken out of context, and cleverly woven into a story. By the 1960's, the paper had segued from reporting on accidents and gore to concentrating on salacious coverage of celebrities.
In 1987, the National Enquirer was instrumental in derailing Gary Hart’s candidacy: the married senator, who was running for President, was having an affair with a young woman named Donna Rice, and the Miami Herald broke the story. After Hart’s dogged denial, the National Enquirer tracked down the photographer who shot the iconic picture of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap on the yacht called Monkey Business. Hart was wearing a Monkey Business t-shirt, and they were both smiling broadly. Hart could no longer deny the affair, and he was forced to bow out of the race.
The scoop catapulted the paper into the realm of believable, hard news, and began to blur the lines between serious and sensational journalism. Many breaking stories followed, including O.J. Simpson and his incriminating Bruno Magli shoe print, the John Edwards and Rielle Hunter relationship, and Jeff Bezos' affair with Lauren Sanchez.
“I think you have to look at the National Enquirer in the realm of popular culture rather than in the realm of journalism,” said Bernstein, who appears frequently in the film, along with Ken Auletta, Judith Regan, Maggie Haberman, and many other highly respected journalists who weighed in on the paper’s impact on the industry.
After the screening, Alina Cho led a question and answer session with director Mark Landsman, Rudick and co-producers Aengus James and Colin Miller.
"When I sat down with some former Enquirer journalists, they just blew me away," said Landsman, who started filming in October 2018.
Cho asked Rudick when, in the process of filming, the Karen McDougal/Donald Trump catch and kill story entered during the making of Scandalous.
"We were filming the first round of interviews to make a sales tape, and it happened right after we finished filming that," said Rudick. "It was - wow. The news hit, and we had a sales tape to deliver. It made the story much more meaningful."
"As the story took hold, and continues to unfold, there is a responsibility to tell it as accurately as possible," added Landsman. "It's five-plus decades of American cultural history, with a lot of ground to cover."
At the reception following the screening, Cho, Landsman, Miller and Rudick joined Generoso Pope III, Mickey and Peggy Drexler, Mary Heilmann, Amy Entelis, and Claude Kaplan Davies, where they enjoyed delicious grilled cheese sandwiches and lively conversation about press bias and the influence it has on our thinking today.
