Newsman helps Crowe & crew get it right

Russell Crowe trusts his instincts, and right now he's almost certain they are dead-on. He just needs confirmation. So he darts his piercing eyes toward me.

Five days earlier I was in the Washington Post newsroom, editing articles for the Metro section. Now I'm in Crowe's Beverly Hills hotel suite, along with director Kevin Macdonald and actresses Helen Mirren and Rachel McAdams. Three Academy Award winners. A magnetic young star. And a newspaper guy you've never heard of, wondering how he got here.

We're dissecting the script for State of Play, a big-screen thriller that revolves around the friendship-rivalry between a politician and a reporter. It's Jan. 6, 2008, the eve of three months of filming.

Crowe's voice booms across the room. Surely, he asserts, a journalist who's been given photos that break open a sensational story wouldn't jeopardize the scoop by sharing them with the police. Right?

I've known him less than 48 hours. Not long enough to gauge whether he finds me useful - or a pest.

My new, surreal role as a pampered movie consultant is quite agreeable: hanging out with A-list celebrities, traveling first-class, staying near the beach in Santa Monica, fattening up on catered meals. It would be nice to stick around. It also would be nice to leave with some integrity intact.

"In most situations, you're right," I begin, making eye contact while building the courage to drop a big "however" on Crowe, who plays the reporter. He's our meal ticket, the guy who rescued the movie six weeks earlier after Brad Pitt abruptly dropped out amid the Hollywood writers' strike. If he gives the word, I'm probably on the red-eye back to Washington.

After explaining why reporters often have adversarial relations with police and protect confidential documents at all costs, I outline a very narrow window of exception. If lives are in peril, then your duties as a citizen trump your principles as a journalist.

Crowe pivots toward Macdonald, who had cautioned me that his leading man doesn't necessarily see the noble side of my profession. I brace for the worst. Instead, an articulate ally emerges.

The exchange we just had, he tells Macdonald, needs to find its way into the scene.

"That was fun, man," Crowe says to me later, after we spar a few more rounds over the script.

My fun would stretch from Los Angeles back to Washington, where most of the exteriors were filmed. And before the cinematic circus left me behind, this would happen:

I would end up with a two-line role opposite Mirren, who'd make me laugh and blush by whispering a slightly risque congratulation (about losing my acting virginity). I'd become a card-carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild; take home a personalized director's chair; accompany McAdams to a play and get swarmed by her adoring teenage fans; and fly on a private jet with producer Andrew Hauptman, who became a good friend, to watch the soccer team he owns play a home game in Chicago.

Oh, and I'd get man-hugged by Crowe.

On a lazy Friday in June 2007, Len Downie, then our executive editor, asked whether I was free to have lunch with Macdonald, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker (One Day in September) fresh off the success of his first feature, The Last King of Scotland.

I hardly had the resume to dazzle Hollywood. After two decades as a news reporter and editor on both coasts, I joined the Post in 2002 as an assistant Maryland editor and worked my way up to Metro editor. But perhaps Macdonald saw in my eyes that his project married two of my lifelong passions, journalism and movies.

Macdonald and his team worked tirelessly and spared no expense to capture authenticity on the micro level. They had me e-mail photos of the clothes and shoes that reporters wear. They needed to know what brands of pens we favor.

The paper in the movie is called the Washington Globe, a down-on-its-luck "second buy" in town, recently taken over by a media conglomerate. Mirren plays the Globe's British expat editor, and Crowe is its shambolic, streetwise reporter whose actions alternately impress and repulse the upstart blogger portrayed by McAdams.

When it was finished, the Globe newsroom, built on a California soundstage and decorated in painstaking detail, was so realistic that you could have put out a paper if the computers worked.

But on the macro level, my crusade for authenticity bumped into unyielding walls at times. When I repeatedly objected to a scene in which a source is surreptitiously videotaped in a hotel room (a firing offense, and a felony in several states), Macdonald politely made clear that in the end, plot rules.

My experiences with Crowe turned out to be positive. Sure, I think he's deeply suspicious of reporters in his own life. But he put aside preconceptions for the most part and used his formidable talents to submerge into my world.

During his first tour of the newsroom set, he appeared jet-lagged and didn't ask many questions. A few days later, on camera, he ad-libbed a perfect line aimed at McAdams' character: "I've been here 15 years, I've got a 16-year-old computer. She's been here 15 minutes and she's got enough gear to launch a [expletive] satellite." He had noticed that the Globe's online staff enjoyed snazzy new technology while the print reporters typed on clunky old equipment. Without a hint from me, he picked up on a gripe you would hear in any print newsroom.

I'm not a critic, but I'm proud of the film. It's an outsider's perspective on American politics and media from Macdonald, a Scotsman who lives in London. It's a psychological tug of war between Crowe's reporter and Ben Affleck's ambitious congressman; they've been on-and-off friends since college, as well as rivals for the same woman (Robin Wright Penn).

Above all, the film serves as a reminder that telling the truth becomes impossible when the journalist gets too close to the people he's covering.

Like Crowe's flawed reporter, whose friendship with the politician is self-destructive, my ability to write about State of Play was compromised from the start. I was paid to be a consultant. Then I became friends with many of the cast and crew. I overheard things that would make for fantastic copy, but I'll never report them. To do so would make me the worst kind of hypocrite.

So is this the full story?

Not even close.

R.B. Brenner, the Washington Post editor who helped Russell Crowe and Helen Mirren get a feel for life at a daily paper, grew up in Center City, rooting for the Eagles and the Phillies.

Brenner, 47, was born in Pittsburgh, but his parents moved to Philadelphia when he was 3. The family lived at 24th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and young R.B. (for "Robert Bennett," although nobody would remember him as anything other than "R.B.") attended Friends Select School.

After that, it was off to Oberlin College, in Ohio, and then into newspapers. He worked at papers in North Carolina, California and Florida before moving to the Post in 2002, where he rose to become Metro editor. He is teaching at the University of Texas this spring, then plans to return to the Post.EndText