Lance Oppenheim On Venice’s Most Uncomfortable Premiere
Sleaze trumped prestige at Venice this week with the world premiere of docudrama Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s opportunist take on an opportunist journalist. Chris Hansen’s gotcha news program To Catch a Predator, a scuzzy spin-off of the more sober broadcast newsmagazine Dateline NBC, reveled in pedophile sting operations in small towns across the country—and turned legally dubious entrapment into must-see TV when it ran from 2004 to 2007.
Primetime, which opens September 25, revisits the show’s 2006 heyday, when audiences were so riveted by the hit reality television show that NBC pitted it against ABC’s ratings juggernaut, the surreal crashed-plane survival serial Lost. And it paints a damning portrait of the ambitious Hansen (Robert Pattinson, also the film’s producer), making him a win-at-all-costs showman who craved respectability while delivering cheesy catchphrases like “Why don’t you have a seat over there?” and “You see how this looks, right?” with a lurid drawl.
“Obviously I hope he likes the movie,” said Pattinson, a bit incredulously, at the press conference. “I would hope in some ways that the amount of inspiration that his character has given to so many people is some kind of compliment.”
“I never really set out to make a movie about Chris Hansen,” the British actor continued. “And then I saw the script, and there’s something electrifying about it. The show was very groundbreaking; it was breaking the rules of television. And there’s something magnetic about his presence. Every actor wants to play that kind of vibrancy. What we were trying to capture is all of our collective enthusiasm in his mystery.”
Oppenheim agreed: “How do we create something that’s stranger than ‘stranger than fiction’? Chris Hansen came up with this incredible artifice: actors pretending to be children; houses that were converted into sets; props like cookies, sweet tea, pepperoni pizza—these mundane things that became mythological on the show and in the culture. And they collided with an extremely real, extremely dangerous situation. It’s this amazing mixture of truth and fiction.”
Hansen wouldn’t know. Last month, distributor A24 set up a screening for the film’s subject, but he refused when the company’s lawyers asked him to sign what he described to Fox News’ Jesse Watters as a “very restrictive agreement” that would have effectively given up his rights to his own name, image and brand. (The claim is a bit hard to believe, although what’s more likely is the common practice of asking those who see a movie in advance to sign an agreement not to talk about it beforehand.)
Hansen’s pricey rejoinder: ad time before every single screening of the film, in which the journalist encourages audiences to visit his website TruBlu (“Home to some of the biggest personalities in crime and investigation”) and watch the law enforcement shows he still produces. It was a clever way for Hansen to inject himself into the film’s release without having to pass judgment on the film itself.
“I was always fascinated by the theatricality of the show,” said Oppenheim. “I was so confused by it—was it a prank show? Was it a news show? Was it a circus with Chris Hansen as a ringleader? I think about Chris Hansen as a journalist, as an entertainer. But I also really think of him as an artist.”
Oppenheim and his screenwriter Ajon Singh originally based their hot-take movie on Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” which chronicled how Dallas-Fort Worth district attorney Bill Conradt committed suicide when Hansen and his crew convinced local law enforcement to surround his house as part of a sting operation to unmask him as a pedophile. The cover of Esquire promoting the article had the headline “A Plea to NBC: Cancel To Catch a Predator Before Someone Dies Again.” Clearly the show was invoking repugnance among its viewers 20 years ago, along with a sense that it was reckless entertainment.
Primetime sells itself as a cautionary tale about how the thirst for fame can unleash destructive forces. But the filmmakers seem more entranced by the power of a cultural phenomenon that has endured for two decades. “I first discovered this TV show through parodies of it,” admits Oppenheim, citing South Park among the satires that skewered Hansen and his oddly tragicomic production. “I think the reason I found the show is because it’s been turned into a meme. And we loved the idea of making something that felt more like a fever dream than a conventional biopic.”
Oppenheim, known more as a documentarian for films like Spermworld and Ren Faire, drew inspiration from expressionistic filmmakers like Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone (whose grand-guignol serial killer movie Natural Born Killers was a touchstone). And the film, which uses saturated colors and a seedy video aesthetic, also embraces thriller genre tropes. There’s even a Chris Hansen jump scare when he suddenly appears and startles one of his crew. “I was always looking for directors who have a very distinct sense of style and aesthetics,” said Pattinson, who called Oppenheim’s take on it a “docufantasia.”
“I was fascinated that this crusading journalist had also become a self-aware entertainer,” said Oppenheim. “To me, this was a great character: the idea of a man who became a myth, a person who became a persona. A person who embraced the meme of himself. And yet continued to do work in a very serious and dark subject. And I thought that would make for such an interesting film: what happens when you turn one of the darkest subjects known to humankind into entertainment?”
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