It's 9:38 p.m. on May 8, 1998 and one light is still on in an otherwise deserted New Republic office. Stephen Glass sits precariously on the edge of his chair, staring dull-eyed at the computer screen. Late nights are not unusual for Washington's rising journalistic star, who in two short years rose to the position of associate editor at the prestigious New Republic. He has freelance contracts with Rolling Stone, George and Harper’s, not to mention a working project with the New York Times and night school to get his law degree. But tonight is different.
The teal hue of the Jukt Micronics Web site reflects off his glasses as a bead of sweat emerges from his brow, sliding down the side of his face like a falling tear. A couple of hours ago, Charles Lane, the editor of The New Republic had confronted him about the inaccuracies in his newest story “Hack Heaven.” But Glass had been quick on his feet, putting Lane on the defensive by acting hurt and making Lane feel guilty about not “backing” him up. Time was running out, though. It wouldn't be long before everyone knew that the article, as well as all the people, places and events it contained, had been a sham.
Glass, now breathing heavily, reaches for his desk drawer, opening it to reveal a brown vial of Prozac. He picks it up, but his shaking hands rattle the pills like chattering teeth. After fumbling with the child-proof top, he tosses a dozen pills into the palm of his hand. As he eyes them, the phone rings. It's his brother, telling him that he had left a message as Jukt Micronics executive George Simms on the Forbes Digital Tool answering machine.
“Are you mad at me?” Glass asks his brother.
“…I just hope you know what you're doing.”
Stephen hangs up the phone and puts the pills back into their container. Maybe his brother's call will buy him some time, he thinks. The next morning, Glass is speaking with Lane again -- but this time Adam Penenberg, an editor from the online publication Forbes Digital Tool, and its executive editor, Kambiz Foroohar, are on the phone as well.
“We looked at the [Jukt Micronics] Web site and it looks very suspicious,” Foroohar said.
“Why?” asked Lane.
“It doesn't look like a real Web site. It looks like a Web site that was created for purposes different from what it proclaims to be.”
This could be a problem, Glass thinks to himself.
Does this lede sound too good to be true? Do a couple of details strike you as a little too personal, too perfectly conceived and appropriate? That's because some of these details -- the internal monologue, the Prozac, the dialogue between Glass and his brother -- are fabricated. The only person that knows what happened the night before Stephen Glass was finally caught in his web of lies is Stephen Glass. No one knows the entire story of Glass, one of contemporary journalism's greatest fabricators and one of Penn's most infamous alumni. And he does not talk to anyone, especially journalists.
The lede, however, is true to form, an anecdotal style Glass perfected -- a style better suited to Hollywood screenplays than the annals of reputable magazines.
•
Ironically, Glass’s own story is almost as unbelievable as the tales he created, a juicy anecdote for the media and eventually the film industry. Five years in the making, Shattered Glass -- a movie about Glass’s quick rise to journalistic stardom and his infamous fall -- wrapped up shooting in Montreal last week. It all began in September of 1998, when Vanity Fair published “Shattered Glass,” an article by Buzz Bissinger that is now considered to be the definitive Glass biopic: covering everything from Glass’s formative years to his time spent at The New Republic. In 1998, HBO optioned the article, bringing in established screenwriter Billy Ray to create a script based on Bissinger’s coverage.
What attracted Ray to script was not only the quality of Bissinger’s article, but a personal connection he felt with both Glass and Lane’s characters. “The biggest thing for me, personally, was that I have a little Stephen Glass in me, as we all do,” Ray admits. “I felt that I understood these two guys, and I wanted to write about them.” That little bit of Stephen Glass, Ray explains is that “deep need to be praised.” While Ray had written movies before -- the lascivious Color of Night, the blockbuster Volcano and this year’s newest Holocaust oeuvre Hart’s War -- this was to become his first attempt at directing. “There are a lot of writers who are obsessed with becoming directors, and I was never one of those guys,” Ray recalls. “But once this script was written, for the first time in my career, I really felt that it was a story that I wanted to tell myself, and it was a story I thought I could tell.”
Back in 1998, however, it was questionable whether or not this script would ever see the light of day. Because of changes in HBO’s corporate hierarchy the script remained “on the shelf” for over a year. Eventually, Lions Gate productions bought the screenplay, which, once unearthed, garnered a lot of attention. Tom Cruise’s production company Cruise/Wagner wanted a piece, along with Baumgarten and Merims’s production company. And surprisingly, Forest Park Productions -- which had been interested in doing a movie about Glass before knowing about Ray’s script -- wanted in. It was not long before the actors began to line up as well. Greg Kinnear flirted with the idea of playing Charles Lane, before they finally went with Peter Sarsgaard, who is no slouch himself. Hank Azaria signed on to play Michael Kelly, the editor who oversaw Glass before Charles Lane. Steve Zahn plays Adam Penenberg, the reporter who finally broke the story. Quite the cast for a low-budget film that chose to shoot in cost-efficient Montreal. But who would play Stephen Glass?
•
Motivation is a Hollywood buzz word. “What’s my motivation?” a petulant actor might ask, but in the case of movies based on true stories, real motivation is a hard to unearth, especially when your main character refuses to talk to the media. Bissinger, as well as Ray, did extensive research into Glass’s background, finding at least two sources to back up every event in the movie. After all the research, the reasoning behind Glass’s actions is still a mystery, but the facts seem to speak for themselves.
By his junior year at Penn, Glass was the editor-in-chief of The Daily Pennsylvanian. A drive to succeed, however, had always been a part of his life, even in adolescence. Glass grew up in Highland Park, an affluent suburb outside of Chicago. Jeffrey Glass, his father, is a gastroenterologist, and Michelle Glass, his mother, is in nursing. Bissinger’s article portrays Glass’s hometown as a community zealously dedicated to the education of their children, and the Glass family was no different. Once accepted to the University, Glass was under pressure from his parents to take pre-med courses and to excel at them. After a less than stellar performance, however, Glass dropped his parents’ route for his own passion: journalism. Although Bissinger was never able to get an interview with Glass, he does admit to meeting Glass in the spring of 1994 at the annual DP Banquet here on campus. Bissinger was a guest speaker at the banquet, where he met both Stephen and his parents. “They [Glass’s parents] asked me to help him get an internship,” Bissinger vividly recalls. “I had never met his parents before in my life. It was just this relentless ambition.”
But those who knew Glass during his college days found him accessible and eager to please. “We were friends at The Daily Pennsylvanian,” remembers Roxanne Patel, who worked with Glass on the DP’s 108th Editorial Board. “He was a very personable guy -- an incredibly intelligent, warm, hardworking person.” All alumni interviewed, including Patel, remember Glass as an unassuming person who had the ability to get people to open up and tell him almost anything. Trustworthy may have been the word they were searching for.
•
Although Forest Park was by far the smallest production company involved, it made the largest contribution to the film: Hayden Christensen as Stephen Glass. But this is not surprising since Forest Park Productions is owned and operated by Hayden’s brother, Penn alumnus Tove Christensen.
Anakin Skywalker as Stephen Glass? It may seem unfathomable. Yet Hayden first gained recognition as Sam Monroe in the indie film Life as a House, a role that was, safe to say, more artistically demanding than playing a Jedi in Star Wars. “We were looking to do something that was smaller, character driven, a psychological journey of character that he would be attracted to as an actor and that we thought would have some appeal to an audience from the storytelling point of view,” producer Tove Christensen explains from his L.A. office. It was only later that he realized he had been at the University while Glass was the executive editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. “It was just an interesting sidenote,” he recalls. “You think, ‘I wonder how many articles I read when I was at Penn that were fictionalized in some way.’”
But what really intrigued both brothers was the duality of Glass’s character: “Was he a pathological liar or was he a genius in what he did?” Unable to fully explain the nature of Glass’s talents, he offers: “There is one scene in the film where Chuck Lane is describing why he thinks people responded to Stephen’s articles. And he says he tells stories about things that we thought we already knew or wanted to believe.” Although this may be a paraphrase of what it is to pander, even pandering, if done well, could be considered a journalistic skill.
•
Liars always make great for great characters in literature, film or theater: Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Kevin Spacey’s Roger “Verbal” Kint in Usual Suspects, even Dustin Hoffman’s Michael Dorsey in Tootsie. They all work because of the tension created by a character with a secret. For, if one thing is true, Stephen Glass is a liar and a damn good one at that.
Glass did it in his own way, though. He manipulated the journalistic freedoms afforded by the prestige of The New Republic in order to weave fantastic yarns about characters on the social fringe. He wrote sensational ledes that should have given someone -- anyone — pause, but very few questioned the validity of Glass’s sources. “When an editor gave him an assignment, he had an uncanny ability — and now we know why — to come back with the perfect anecdote, the perfect story, the perfect interview,” says Bissinger. “He just knew how to key in.”
But Glass did not fool only the unsuspecting public; he was able to deceive some of the most prominent names in journalism, people known for their cynical and inquisitive minds. Glass either partially or fully fabricated 27 out of the 41 articles he wrote for The New Republic. In an article for George, Glass got away with printing a quote from a fake source about Clinton advisor Vernon Jordan’s sexual proclivities. In Harper’s, he claimed he had been hired by the highly suspect psychic-phone network, Psychic Believers Network. The New Republic believed he founded a fake anti-Clinton organization called the Commission to Restore the Presidency to Greatness.
The stories for George and his New Republic story about D.A.R.E. were aberrations, however. Part of Glass’s cunning was that he knew a fake person could not sue him for libel. If you make something up, he realized, you might as well go all the way and make sure your main character does not exist, because then he will not have a lawyer. Simple, but terribly dangerous. All it would take was one person who knew something Glass did not, and that person could spot his wandering pen. That one person was Adam Penenberg.
The May 18, 1998 piece “Hack Heaven” is the final article Glass wrote for The New Republic. Its portrayal of Ian Pestil, a 15-year-old hacker who supposedly broke into the Jukt Micronics corporate Web site, was too perfectly conceived. Penenberg — who at the time was an editor at Forbes Digital Tool — admits that he was not quite sure whether or not Ian Pestil or Jukt Micronics existed, until an exhaustive search on Lexis Nexis turned up only Stephen Glass’s article. As Penenberg readily admits in “Lies, Damn Lies and Fiction,” the article that broke the scandal, “It’s tough proving a negative. It is even tougher proving that something or someone does not exist.”
Yet Glass’s story seemed plausible enough. According to his article, Pestil hacked into the Jukt Micronics corporate computer system and posted everyone’s salary along with lewd photos reading “THE BIG BAD BIONIC BOY HAS BEEN HERE BABY.” Essentially being held hostage by Pestil, Jukt Micronics had no other choice but to compensate him handsomely and hire him to revamp their Internet security system. Plausible, sure, but completely made up. As soon as Penenberg realized the truth, he informed Lane, Glass’s editor. Although Glass never confessed, Lane soon found that the Jukt Micronics telephone number belonged to a cell phone, and that cell phone most likely belonged to Glass’s brother.
•
Pestil’s adolescent tirade, as captured in Glass’s lede for the story, is now a part of journalistic folklore: “I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Man comic [book] number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy, and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!” The article even goes as far as to detail Pestil’s agent’s business card which reads “super-agent to super-nerds.” The details were so colorful — so in accordance with the popular conception of renegade hackers running amuck on the Internet — that Glass was lauded rather than suspected. Every device, down to the minutia of bracketed quotes, was used in order to grant the story a legitimacy it did not deserve. “Let’s give Stephen credit,” Bissinger admits. “He was clever and he was charming, and he knew the fact-checking system, and people just got sucked in.”
Glass, however, is not alone: journalism has a storied history of fraud and fabrication. In 1981, Janet Cooke admitted that her Pulitzer Prize-winning story “Jimmy’s World” had been nothing but fiction. And in 1998, Stephen Glass was not the only one on the journalistic chopping block. Columnists Michael Barnicle and Patricia Smith were caught up in a similar scandal for the Boston Globe. Barnicle plagiarized quotes from George Carlin’s book Brain Droppings, while Smith reportedly fabricated some of the characters in her columns. Beth Piskora, in a June 17, 1998 story for the New York Post, allegedly created a story about mobsters who had robbed people with fake Y2K software that sent money to a mob-controlled account. Barnicle later admitted that his unethical actions sprang from pure laziness, for many the impetus was the pressure of the highly competitive profession.
“Stephen Glass is indicative of a larger phenomenon,” explains Barbie Zelizer, a professor at the Annenberg School of Communication. “Journalism takes place out of sight, [so there is a] built-in trust of journalists.” Without this trust, Zelizer explains, journalists would not be able to do their jobs. But how much should the public trust their journalists? “You must be an educated consumer with media,” Penenberg warns. “[Fabrications] happen all the time.” Zelizer comes to the same conclusion: we as a public must assume a critical stance in order to protect ourselves from fraudulent stories.
The answer, however, is not that simple. Glass worked for one of the most prestigious magazines in the country. The nature of his anecdotes, and the fact that people believed them, goes beyond simple ignorance. “Glass couldn’t have been the only one deceiving his readers and editors,” writes Tom Scocca in a Boston Phoenix column printed soon after Glass was fired from The New Republic. “They were deceiving themselves.” Ana Marie Cox, in a column for Mother Jones, echoes Scocca: “His stories gave credence to the assumptions his editors and readers already wanted to believe.”
Stephen Glass, therefore, is in a league of his own, due not only the sheer quantity of articles that he partially or fully fabricated, but to their quality and apparent credibility as well. And though many wonder how he got away with it, the real question is why his readership and his editors let him.
One may have to wait for the fall release of Shattered Glass to get at least partial answers to these questions. But even then, what was really going on inside Glass’s head will continue to be a mystery. Penenberg offers one way of looking at it, “Even if he did tell you [why he did it], would you believe him?”
