How the 'Paterno' movie seems to be missing some key scenes
The list of once-respected figures suddenly and tragically falling into disrepute has been growing for years.
Pete Rose. O.J. Simpson. Bill Cosby. John Edwards. Harvey Weinstein. Kevin Spacey. Matt Lauer. Even Al Franken.
Each of them accused of doing something very wrong. Failure to pay taxes (Rose). Double murder (Simpson). Campaign finance violations (Edwards). And a plethora of sexual allegations (all the rest).
And then there's Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach who fell from grace because he did nothing - and learned late in life that doing nothing can be wrong, too.
The HBO movie, "Paterno," which began airing last Saturday, is, unfortunately, an uneven and unsatisfying look at the scandal that took down Paterno and, yes, the Joe Paterno statue that had been put up on the Penn State campus.
The movie covers only the final weeks of Paterno's life - part of it as he laid in an MRI machine - when the sexual abuse allegations against his longtime assistant, Jerry Sandusky, finally began to hit home.
Al Pacino expertly plays the 84-year-old Paterno, who slowly began to recognize his failure to deal forcefully with the Sandusky scandal, which came to light in 2011 but which he may have known about as far back as 1976. Sandusky had been his assistant coach from 1966 to 1999.
A reminder from his wife that his son, now grown, was one of many boys who once played with Sandusky in the family pool seemed a stunning revelation.
Paterno had told school administrators in 2002 that Sandusky may have abused a boy in a shower, but now insists he was too busy with his Nittany Lions to do more.
"I had a job to do," he says. "I was coaching."
Administrators did not follow up on the report and never notified authorities, placing Penn State's reputation ahead of Sandusky's victims and paying a heavy price.
Three Penn State officials, including President Graham Spanier, were sentenced to jail and the school was fined $60 million while the Penn State football team suffered severe NCAA sanctions.
There are not many heroes in Paterno, save one: a local reporter named Sara Ganim who broke the story about Sandusky molesting young boys while the university looked the other way. Ganim, now with CNN, won a Pulitzer Prize for her dogged reporting.
Paterno was fired Nov. 9, 2011, and died of cancer two-and-a-half months later, on Jan. 22, 2012.
I happened to be a Paterno fan and a major problem with the movie, in my mind, is that it gives scant attention to Paterno's life before the scandal; by all accounts it was a life well-lived.
Even as the movie began running on HBO, a group of nearly 300 Penn State lettermen, including Franco Harris, signed a statement calling the production "uninformed" and "shameless." Part of the statement:
"As coach, educator and philanthropist, Joe Paterno was a positive force in our lives, molding us not only to win games, but to win in life.
"His character, integrity and moral compass will live on in us long after the ill-gotten ratings of this reckless attempt at entertainment fades away."
It's not a bad epitaph for Paterno - the man and the movie.
Contact Bob Bestler at bestler6@tds.net.
This story was originally published April 13, 2018 at 3:08 PM with the headline "How the 'Paterno' movie seems to be missing some key scenes."