Jewell sparks emotion
For Richard Jewell’s mother and lawyer, Clint Eastwood’s film brings pain but also healing, writes Josh Rottenberg.
Richard Jewell loved movies, particularly anything with John Wayne or Clint Eastwood.
Living with his mother, Bobi, in her Atlanta apartment,
Jewell, who worked as a security guard, would sometimes tell her when there was a film on TV he thought she’d like so they could watch it together.
‘‘His schedule was iffy – he was gone at night most of the time – but, if there was a good one, he’d let me know about it and we’d watch it,’’ Bobi Jewell recalls. ‘‘He loved his loud music and the people in the apartment above were elderly and they used to bang on the wall. But other than that, he was a good kid.’’
Back then, Bobi Jewell could never have possibly imagined that Eastwood would one day direct a film about her son – Richard Jewell, now showing in cinemas. She could never have imagined that she would bake her famous pound cake for one of Richard’s biggest heroes and walk a red carpet at a glitzy premiere with Eastwood, holding his hand. But then again, before that terrible summer of 1996, she could never have imagined that there would even be a story to tell.
On July 27, 1996, a week into the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Richard Jewell was working security at a nighttime concert in the city’s Centennial Park when he noticed a suspicious backpack underneath a bench and alerted the police. A bomb squad was called in and, as Jewell and other security and law enforcement personnel worked to evacuate people from the area, an explosive device in the backpack detonated. One person was killed and 111 were injured – a casualty count that surely would have been much higher had Jewell not discovered the bomb and helped move concertgoers to safety.
Initially, Jewell was hailed as a hero. But just three days later, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the FBI was treating him as a possible suspect, under the theory that the security guard, disgruntled over a career that hadn’t panned out the way he’d hoped, might have planted the bomb himself so he could then ‘‘discover’’ it and be celebrated for saving lives. Over the next three months, Jewell and his mother became virtual prisoners in Bobi’s apartment as the FBI kept him under constant surveillance and the media depicted him as the presumed culprit.
Even after his name was cleared with the help of a lawyer named Watson Bryant – even after domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty to the Centennial Park bombing and three other attacks in 2005 – the ordeal would hover over Jewell until his death in 2007 at age 44 of heart failure from complications of diabetes. It still haunts his mother to this day.
Bobi Jewell says she’s grateful that Eastwood has made that ordeal the subject of his latest film – with Paul Walter Hauser as Richard, Kathy Bates as Bobi and Sam Rockwell as Bryant – and that those who may have only vague memories, if any, of the bombing and its aftermath will know that her son really was a hero. ‘‘That’s what I want people to know instead of what we have had to contend with,’’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘‘I just want the world to know what can happen to a little old lady. I was 60-something when it happened and I’m 83 now. So life goes on.’’
Their bonds forged in that media and legal firestorm, Bryant and the Jewells remained close; for a time, Bobi even babysat for the lawyer’s two children. Bryant hopes Richard Jewell will finally erase any lingering doubts about Jewell’s role in the bombing.
‘‘Look, to this day I run into people and when you say Richard Jewell, they say, ‘Oh, he’s the guy that got off,’ ’’ says Bryant, who still bristles at the way Jewell’s reputation was tarnished.
‘‘These bums [in the FBI] never had enough to arrest him – they had nothing but a bunch of BS taken out of context that they used to frame him up for a story that was too good to be true. Yet, to this day, people think he had something ugly to do with the bombing – when he’s the guy that, but for him, it would have been raining body parts when that bomb went off. I can’t imagine how many people are alive today and how many kids have been born just because Richard did his job.’’
When first approached about starring in Richard Jewell, both Rockwell and Bates were largely unfamiliar with the story of the Centennial Park bombing, which neither had followed closely at the time.
‘‘I just remember Muhammad Ali with the torch [at the Atlanta Olympics’ opening ceremonies] and crying like a baby at that,’’ Rockwell says. But after meeting Bryant and Bobi Jewell, they quickly came to understand how profoundly they and Richard had been impacted by those three months and the years of litigation and other aftershocks that followed. (NBC News and the New York Post eventually settled lawsuits filed by Jewell.)
‘‘I met Bobi when I went down to shoot in Atlanta and we spent quite a few hours together,’’ says Bates, who earned a Golden Globes nomination for supporting actress for her performance.
‘‘Even after all these years, it’s still really raw for her and she teared up quite a few times as she told me some anecdotes: how they were supported by their church but prevented from seeing them and how Richard was prevented from going to visit a friend when he was dying. It was just devastating. You don’t realise when you throw a grenade in a foxhole like that that you’re going to have so much collateral damage.’’
For his part, Rockwell says he doesn’t see the film in political terms at all. ‘‘I think it’s an oldfashioned melodrama about injustice,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s like a John Grisham novel or Arthur Miller’s The Crucible or Philadelphia or A Few Good Men. They don’t really make movies like this any more. I don’t know if they’ll make them at all in 10 years.’’
To this day, Bobi Jewell isn’t totally sure how her son processed the experience of being publicly vilified for something he hadn’t done, of being turned overnight from a national hero to a purported glory-chasing criminal. Through it all, he didn’t talk much about his feelings because he didn’t want to add to her worries.
‘‘He lived with it,’’ she says quietly. ‘‘There was a lot I didn’t know because he wouldn’t tell me . . . I think the children now will know what Richard went through. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen to anybody else.’’ – Los Angeles Times
Richard Jewell (TBC) now showing in cinemas.