Week 10

Natalia Schack

Comm 200

Prof. Peter Lindmark

March 23, 2020

Shattered Glass was a great movie that shows how people can tell lies upon lies and then they start to believe their own lies. Stephen Glass is a college student who has a full course load and works at The News Republic writing stories for the newspaper. Glass’s stories are so humorous and well written people didn't realize they were all fabricated by Steve himself. Throughout the firm it presented as if there was just a little something off about Stephen Glass and his mysterious stories. In the real story of Stephen Glass it says, “Glass would present other elaborate orchestrations of made-up scenes and characters, this time passing them off as journalism…, painfully insecure boy had won over the world of magazines with the vigor of his youth and his equally alluring vulnerability”. The article headlines were very interesting, and from experience this isn't the easiest task to accomplish, however Steve kept them short and sweet with a hitch. This was just as true in the movie’s plot. Another thing that is similar about the movie plot and the real story is that Steve had a lot on his plate. In the movie his friend Caitlin and David always talked to him about the amount of work he has to deal with. In the real story it explains that, “People try to explain it now by citing the pressure he faced to perform, and it is true that he came from an environment in which there was brutal pressure to excel”. This could also have something to do with in the movie he always had publishers surrounding or calling him whenever he was not writing a piece. One thing that was not touched on in the real story was that he had some mental problems. In the movie it shows him saying that, “he doesn't know what he could do to himself or others”. However, when reading the real story it doesn't say that he had these problems. After watching and reading about this story, it showed me that not every good, well written story will always be a publishable piece. It also shows that writers always need a fact checker, editor, peers, and bosses to read over pieces that are based solely on an individual event. The actors in the movie did a great job playing their roles, especially Steve (Hayden Christensen) who played a college student dealing with stress, a newspaper writer, and a mentally unstable person. However the first two examples may run together sometime here and there.