Director Billy Ray talks with actor Hank Azaria on the set of Shattered Glass, a drama about Stephen Glass, a New Republic writer who in the mid-to-late nineties fabricated more than half his stories.

All the President's Men celebrated American journalism with a fervor as celebratory as past newspaper movies like Park Row, director Sam Fuller's 1952 drama about Phineas Mitchell, the upstart publisher of The Globe and his battle against The New York Star, the established voice of the elite. In these movies, reporters are heroes.

Journalism, or the disgraces of journalism, is the subject of director Billy Ray's Shattered Glass, about Stephen Glass, an associate editor at The New Republic who in the mid-to-late '90s fabricated more than half of his stories.

Bernstein and Woodward, bought to life in the movie by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, uncovered the conspiracies and fought paranoia. In Shattered Glass, a detailed, matter-of-fact story about lying, its protagonist creates dishonesty. In the history of American newspaper movies, Shattered Glass is a turning point, changing the reporter from working-class hero to a cheating member of the corrupt establishment.

Ray, the screenwriter of Volcano (1997) and Hart's War (2002), adapted a magazine article on Glass' rise and fall into Shattered Glass. Boyishly handsome Hayden Christensen, best known for his Star Wars performance, plays Glass as a cloying careerist who ingratiates himself with his superiors while his misdeeds continue to mount.

Ray shows the key to Glass' success, the story conferences where he wowed New Republic editors and colleagues with his colorful pitches. It's here that Glass first talks about his latest prized story, "Hack Heaven," a convention of computer hackers featuring 15-year-old Ian Restil, who broke into the computer network of a hi-tech company, Jukt Micronics. None of it was true and, for the time being, none of that mattered.

If Ray wanted to celebrate journalism, he could have focused on the Forbes online reporter Adam Penenberg (played in the film by Steve Zahn) who uncovered Glass' in-depth lying in "Hack Heaven." Ray could have written more scenes for Charles Lane (Peter Sarsgaard), executive editor of The New Republic, from 1997 to 1999, the brief hero of the movie for firing Glass and restoring dignity to The New Republic. Instead, Ray stays true to Glass' story and the impact is devastating.

"We screened All the President's Men for cast and crew two days before production started," Ray says, joining Penenberg earlier this fall at the Toronto Film Festival, raising his voice above the din of a hotel bar. "The idea was to show the cast and crew how high we were setting the bar, with the full knowledge that we were never going to get there."

With regard to making an ethical statement, Ray might have followed Glass' story after the fall, emphasizing the consequences of his dishonesty. Then again, Glass hasn't appeared to suffer. He earned a law degree from Georgetown University, received a six-figure advance for his novel, The Fabulist, about a Washington reporter who's a habitual liar, and currently works as a clerk for D.C. Superior Court Judge A. Franklin Burgess Jr. On an ironic note, Glass is also scheduled to take part in a media ethics panel at George Washington University.

In real life, the pro-journalism theory is that there are more honest reporters than lying cheats like Glass and New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, who plagiarized quotes and fabricated material in more than 35 articles.

On the screen, Glass' make-believe journalism peers fail to make any long-lasting mark. Kate Hudson played a bubbly self-help columnist in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Ewan McGregor was a smug, womanizing journalist in the retro comedy, Down With Love. Kate Winslet was earnest as a reporter trying to uncover the truth surrounding Kevin Spacey's death row inmate, but director Alan Parker's soapy melodrama The Life of David Gale was too overblown to take seriously.

One of the better press heroes in recent years is Al Pacino's portrayal of CBS 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman in the true-life drama The Insider. Bergman struggles to tell the story of tobacco scientist/whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) against the threats of tobacco companies and the fears of CBS. With Bergman, one sees a reporter close to the inspirational spirit of All the President's Men.

An even better crusader is Dublin journalist Veronica Guerin, played by Cate Blanchett in director Joel Schumacher's recent drama. Irish gangsters murdered Guerin in 1996 for her stories on the Irish drug trade, making her a martyr for her profession and an example of how one person can make a difference for the better. That's not something anyone would ever say about Glass and, for now, in the realm of American cinema, he's the villainous face of American journalism.

"Sitting with the audience last night, the movie is read differently by people than I thought it would be," Ray says. "They actually read it like a suspense movie. The jeopardy in the movie is not the death of a person like in a classic suspense movie. It's the death of an ideal. It's this little thing of truth in the movie and it keeps getting close to getting completely strangled.

"When I sit with the audience and feel the tension start to build as the movie goes on, it's like they're afraid that something is going to die on screen and it's not a person." ©