The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Off-field drama in HBO’s ‘Paterno’
Movie looks at the sex abuse scandal that toppled Penn State’s coach
On Oct. 29, 2011, it was a happy time in footballcrazy Happy Valley, the Pennsylvania region where Penn State is located.
On that day, the Nittany Lions — as the Penn State team is known — beat Illinois in a sloppy, errorplagued game to go to 8-1 on the season. More significantly, Penn State’s legendary coach, the 84-year-old Joe Paterno, notched his 409th career victory, making him the winningest coach in NCAA Division 1 football history.
However, before the team took the field again Nov. 12, Paterno was out, and his career was forever clouded by a sexual-abuse scandal involving children. It was a precipitous and shocking fall, bringing down a man known for his integrity after 45 years as head coach and 61 years in the school’s football program.
The new HBO dramatic film “Paterno,” debuting April 7, examines those tumultuous two weeks, which included a media frenzy and a riot by Paterno supporters. Much of the film’s perspective is from inside the Paterno household, where he, his wife and his family contemplate what to do, and his grown children ask their father difficult questions about what he knew.
The film isn’t about “heroes and villains,” explains its director, Barry Levinson. “We are talking about human behavior, and how do we function, and how do we respond to certain things and try to make sense out of it?”
A week after the Illinois victory, former longtime Paterno assistant Jerry Sandusky was indicted on multiple felony charges related to raping children. Allegations went back at least as far as 1998, and some of the victims were as young as 10.
Two upper-echelon university officials would also be indicted. Paterno would not, but the question raged: Did Paterno — or “JoePa,” as he was known — look the other way, allowing a pedophile to continue to prey on children?
The film — drawn in part from Paterno family adviser Guido D’Elia’s account to reporter Joe Posnanski — avoids rigorous judgments on the head coach, letting the audience decide, but clearly casts him as culpable to some degree.
Al Pacino, who plays Paterno, describes the coach as like a “king” or “emperor” in his world of football, but someone who felt uneasy when dealing with sexual-abuse issues.
“I think this is a character that is used to control,” says the 77-year-old actor. “And going into this area he was tentative about it, because he was unsure of himself.”
The story of the Sandusky case had been broken the previous March by Sara Ganim, then a 23-year-old reporter for The Patriot-News, a small newspaper serving the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, area. Now a CNN correspondent, she is played by Riley Keough (“Logan Lucky”) in the film. Ganim had first heard about the sexual-abuse allegation two years before when she was an undergrad at Penn State. But the story had almost no traction and was ignored by the national media.
All that changed when the indictment came down Nov. 5, a week after the Illinois victory, and the charges were available for everyone to read on the internet.
“It did not hold anything back. It was very graphic,” remembers Ganim, who would go on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting. “It’s something that a lot of the characters deal with in the movie, the fact that you can sit down at your kitchen table and read it.”
At one point in the film, Paterno is reading the Sandusky grand jury indictment and turns to one of his sons and asks, “What is sodomy, anyway?”
“It really opened up a conversation about things that people were not comfortable otherwise talking about,” says Ganim.
Paterno, under advice from his lawyer, announced his retirement Nov. 9, but the college board fired him that night in a phone call effective immediately.
After the sudden announcement, “thousands of students stormed the downtown area to display their anger and frustration, chanting the former coach’s name, tearing down light poles and overturning a television news van parked along College Avenue,” according to a report in the New York Times.
Gamin was there when they filmed that scene for the HBO movie.
“You know, I had a mild panic attack when I arrived because it was a scene from my life that I had already lived,” she says. “It was a little bit too much to watch. But in the entire process, I think, everybody has been very careful to make sure to capture the nuance of what happened.”
“Paterno” is the third collaboration by Levinson and Pacino for HBO. The others being 2010’s “You Don’t Know Jack,” about assisted-suicide advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian; and 2013’s “Phil Spector,” in which Pacino played the record producer and convicted murderer. (In a strange note, Anthony Scaramucci — yes, that one — is listed as a co-executive producer.)
Pacino says that while he “felt as though I understood what was going on,” he hasn’t made a “concrete decision” about what he thinks of Paterno, who died from cancer a little more than two months after he was fired.
Paterno’s legacy remains a hot-button issue. After the scandal, the NCAA had stripped him of 100 victories, but a lawsuit reinstated them. His statue was removed from the university in 2012.
“He obviously died before anybody ultimately found out every possible thing you could find out,” says the Oscar-winning Levinson. “It is truly a tragedy, and a tragedy in all things, in terms of what happened with the victims, in terms of what happened with Paterno, whether you think he did or he didn’t.”