Sex! Gossip! Scandal! For over 60 years, the National Enquirer has pumped out salacious, shocking stories, stretching the limits of journalism and blurring the lines between truth and fiction. The From its coverage of Elvis’s death to Monica Lewinsky and the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the National Enquirer rattled the foundations of American culture and politics, sometimes allegedly using payoffs and blackmail to get its scoops. With rare archival footage and revelations as wild as National Enquirer headlines themselves, SCANDALOUS examines our obsession with the rich, famous and powerful, and the tabloid that has fed those obsessions for generations of Americans.
The film reveals how the paper carefully capitalized on the celebrity fascinations of the average American and combined that with the ruthless, sometimes immoral methods that its reporters would use to get the story at all costs in order to fulfill its ultimate mission: sell the most papers of anybody in the world. The National Enquirer’s legacy is editorial choices that have ultimately changed the course of history, for example, “catch and kill” deals during the 2016 election which created the current norm of sensationalism and tabloidization within “mainstream” news sources.
SCANDALOUS also spotlights several major instances where the Enquirer had the story before anyone else, including scoops about Bill Cosby, Bob Hope, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and OJ Simpson. With the Simpson trial, the Enquirer went head to head with mainstream news sources for the first time, as both competed to break as many new details as they could to the insatiable American public. And in the end it was the Enquirer who was able to catch OJ in a critical lie, which was paramount to his being found liable in the civil case against him.
Directed by Mark Landsman, SCANDALOUS features interviews with former Enquirer reporters and editors, including Iain Calder and Steve Coz, as well as journalists Ken Auletta, Carl Bernstein, and Maggie Haberman.
In theatres November 15, 2019.
