"There's a shorthand that you only get from knowing each other forever," says Greg Grunberg, who plays Paterno's son Scott. He contrasts that with an anecdote about a director who, as Pacino was giving what he felt was a transcendent, once-in-a-blue-moon take, yelled "Cut!" and complained that the actor was holding a fork in the wrong hand. Pacino credits Levinson for inspiring a trust that fosters experimentation. Levinson credits Pacino for being unafraid to experiment. Pacino and Levinson are, like Hall of Fame teammates, happy to heap praise on each other. There's Joe Paterno, there's the head of the family, and they can't make sense out of it all." Levinson points to a moment in the film drawn from Paterno family adviser Guido D'Elia's account to reporter Joe Posnanski, in which Paterno, reading the grand jury presentment indicting Sandusky, turned to his son and asked, "What is sodomy, anyway?" I think that's what Barry sort of encouraged." Sometimes he's feeling all these things in one scene. "Then there's the period of doubt, and kind of concern and depression and looking for resolutions, looking kind of contrite. "It's denial, and then it's sort of anger and self-righteousness," he says. "That's one of the first things I thought about him."įor Pacino, it's what happened to Paterno when his attention was torn from the game and forced onto a subject that he had spent years looking past that made him an intriguing character. "The blinders go on with that focus," Pacino says. He tells a story about how Paterno, as an assistant coach, spent nearly 10 years living in the spare room of a fellow assistant's home, eschewing a social life so that he could concentrate on football until his colleague, who was married, told him to move out and start dating. "It was clear in the films I looked at and the research I did that he was someone who you could say was focused on football," Pacino says. A gut punch of a final scene implies, as do several other moments in the film, that Paterno did much worse than misread a few warning signs. Pacino and Levinson's Paterno, at the very least, willfully ignored obvious signs that Sandusky was a predator. There is deep ambiguity in the film about how culpable Paterno was, but not whether he was culpable. A settlement of a lawsuit by Pennsylvania state officials against the NCAA in 2015 reinstated more than 100 wins under Paterno that had been voided as part of the program's penalization - reinstalling him as Division I's most prolific football winner.īut Levinson and Pacino don't treat Paterno as some culture-war issue about which there are two equally weighted opinions. But much of the Penn State community has rallied around his legacy. Nationally he has been abandoned by institutions such as Brown and Nike, the abuse scandal having stripped his name's prestige. In the years since Paterno's death, sentiment about him has fractured. But a subsequent investigation by former FBI director Louis Freeh found that Paterno concealed information about Sandusky assaulting children and that he may have encouraged university officials to cover up Sandusky's crimes as early as 2001. Paterno reported the incident to university officials, who effectively covered it up. According to the initial indictment, Paterno first learned about the abuse in 2002, when an assistant coach, Mike McQueary, told him he saw Sandusky showering with a boy aged 10 to 12. Those he assaulted were as young as 8 years old. Using his charitable foundation to develop personal relationships with young boys, Sandusky showered with victims, forced them to perform oral sex on him and anally raped them. He was convicted a year later on 45 charges related to eight victims. Sandusky was charged in 2011 with 48 counts of sexual abuse of children that took place between 19.
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