īut if Stephen Glass, Cooke, Cohn and Smith were in their prime today, they might be raking in big bucks. More recently, Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith was fired for making up parts of her columns. Nik Cohn, 21 years after the fact, blithely admitted to having made up most of the New York story that inspired the film Saturday Night Fever. Janet Cooke had done it in 1980 in a Pulitzer Prize–winning piece for The Washington Post. He was hardly the first to make up stories. Stephen Glass, however, was not an isolated case. Glass studied law after his journalism days but both the states of New York and California refused to admit him to the bar for failing the moral fitness determination test. You lose your career and you lose your chance of any new career. Get caught fabricating the news and you get fired, vilified and shunned. It was also peppered with inventive lies. “ Don’t You D.A.R.E.“, for instance, was an article critical of D.A.R.E.’s rehab program. He invented people, incidents and even companies, and he occasionally interspersed them with real events. A journalist who rose from the ranks at The New Republic, Stephen Glass was eventually fired after it was exposed that 27 of the 41 feature stories he wrote for the magazine between 19 contained falsehoods and make believe.

Rather, it as a stylized depiction of the rise and fall of talented writer. Our conversation shifted to other topics but, inside my head, I was already mulling over how relevant the story of Stephen Glass is today. It was his strongest performance and, perhaps, the only proof of what a good actor he was and a preview of what he could have been had he not given up his acting career too soon. As an aside, I remarked that Shattered Glass will always be my favorite Hayden Christensen film. The talk about Star Wars veered toward what ever happened to Hayden Christensen, where he had gone and why he wasn’t making movies anymore. As for the prequel trilogy, I told her that Jar Jar Binks will always be a deal breaker. I don’t even like Return of the Jedi all that much because of the ewoks.

I like all the films although in varying degrees but, with Star Wars, I only like the original trilogy and The Force Awakens. One time, over dinner, Alex and I were talking about Star Wars and Harry Potter.

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