Local editor has a stake in new movie ‘Kill the Messenger’

Eighteen years ago, San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb published one of the most contested stories in modern journalism: “Dark Alliance,” which alleged that a California drug ring had sold crack cocaine to gang members and funneled the profits to a CIA-backed army in Nicaragua.

Soon, the claims in Webb’s series came under attack by other journalists, and the Pulitzer-winning reporter’s career ended in disarray before he committed suicide in 2004. But Webb was never without defenders — including Nick Schou, the managing editor of OC Weekly, who wrote the 2006 book “Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb.”

Now, that message is reaching a whole new audience. Michael Cuesta’s movie version of “Kill the Messenger,” which stars Jeremy Renner as Webb, came out this fall from Focus Features, and reviews have been generally positive (as of last week, the film had a 70% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the New Yorker’s David Denby, who praised its “steady flow of tension,” among the fans).

Earlier this year in his Costa Mesa office — where Webb’s work occupies a prominent spot on the bookcase — Schou spoke with the Daily Pilot about the fallen reporter’s legacy and his own journey from newsroom to screen. The following are excerpts from the conversation:

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I noticed at the beginning of your book, you have this little “Dramatis Personae” section with all the characters. When you were writing the book, did you have any aspirations of a movie version someday?

Yeah. I mean, I knew that Hollywood had been interested in Gary’s story, and I kind of felt like it was a story that should be told on film, but I just, at that point when I wrote the book, felt lucky to be able to write about Gary because I’d never written a book before, and it was not easy getting that story accepted by a publisher. I couldn’t even find an agent, actually, to represent me for that purpose. And so it got rejected by several different agents and publishers before Nation Books agreed to publish it. So I was just so relieved that I was able to pull that off, that as far as where it would go from there wasn’t anything I was even capable of thinking about at that point.

There’s a line in your book where you call “Dark Alliance” “the most explosive journalistic expose since the end of the Cold War.” Do you think there’s been anything in the almost 20 years since “Dark Alliance” that’s been that big?

Well, I mean, there’s been a lot of major revelations lately, as far as WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden and, you know, big sort of revelatory works of journalism that have come out as a result of that type of event — by which I mean leaks, basically. So that’s pretty common nowadays, and those can be very explosive as well.

What I really meant by what I said about “Dark Alliance” was that it was pretty much the first big, major journalistic expose in the Internet age. It came out right at the advent of the Internet and was the first big journalistic product to get that widespread of an audience, and it wasn’t the result of anything being leaked per se. I mean, Gary Webb was given leads by sources, for sure, but he spent a year investigating this story and worked passionately and diligently to get it out. It wasn’t just something that was handed to him on a plate.

There was that piece in the American Journalism Review just a few months after Webb died — the piece by Susan Paterno — and the headline was “The Sad Saga of Gary Webb.” Do you think there’s a lesson to be taken from Webb’s story?

The way I posited it in the book was that his story is kind of a cautionary tale for journalism itself. I mean, he had his reputation destroyed over a very complicated story, and it was a story that almost every reporter that had tried to write about this previously had kind of lived to regret having done. And he was warned by people that had covered Iran-Contra that this was just a toxic, radioactive story, and it really gauged how strong his relationship was with his editors. And so what I charted out in the book was how the story sort of broke down.

Gary Webb made mistakes in his reporting, I think, and his editors also made mistakes. He was a very courageous reporter, but he also demanded a very kind of tenacious editor that could check the claims that were being made. Somehow in the process of the editing of this story, I think, certain exaggerations weighed in on the story that helped it achieve the impact that it had but which weren’t necessary, and I think that the story would have been very compelling and very important had it not reached as far as it did.

And so that’s pretty much what I tried to uncover, and I think it’s certainly a terrible personal tragedy what happened to him, but it’s also really an important journalism story just as far as how this story kind of ruined a particular person’s career. And I pointed out at the end that he was the only person that paid any price for this at all. All the other editors that were involved in it got promoted, and their careers progressed untarnished.

About the movie — you’re an extra in one scene. Is that correct?

Correct, yes.

Which scene are you an extra in?

There’s a scene where Gary’s story has just been published, and he’s appearing on talk shows and talking about it. I think he’s given a $50 check by the editor of the newspaper, and there’s a big round of applause for the work. So it shows a bunch of middle-aged-looking editors watching that through the conference room glass, and I’m one of the people that you see in a brief flash. But if you blink, you’ll miss it.

Is there any art to being a good extra?

You know, for just half a second of screen time, you spend two days sort of standing around, so it just takes a lot of patience. But for me, obviously, it was really exciting just to be there, and to be a part of the making of the movie was a real treat for me, to actually see it unfold. And just even playing a tiny role in it was kind of a dream of a lifetime, I guess.

How about Jeremy Renner? Does he do a good impression of Webb?

Yeah. I mean, he really captures, I think, Webb’s personality when he was enthusiastically chasing down a story, and then the changes that happened after that. It’s an exciting film.

Usually, when a movie comes out that’s based on real life, whether it’s “Argo” or “Captain Phillips” or “The King’s Speech” or one of those, you have this sort of Greek chorus of people coming out and saying, “No, it didn’t happen exactly that way” or “Here’s how they shifted the timeline” or something like that. From what you’ve seen of “Kill the Messenger,” do you feel like it is pretty much true to life?

I mean, it’s a mixture of what really happened and what inevitably happens when you make a movie about what really happened. It’s a compressed biopic, so certain characters are composite and certain scenes are dramatized in a way to please audiences, I think, for lack of a better word. But you know, there’s an art to making movies that I can’t really fathom. It’s certainly a very real story.