Orig Post www.thedailybeast.com | Repost Duerson Foundation 12/28/2015
Filmmaker Peter Landesman, a former journalist, opens up about his new movie—and talks about how the NFL tries to cover up the fact that the brutal sport is killing its players.
Despite the National Football League’s myriad problems—from domestic abusers like Greg Hardy and Ray Rice receiving slaps on the wrist for their heinous offenses to the NFL’s unsettling relationship with high-stakes fantasy-sports firms—the league is rarely kept in check. It is, after all, America’s Sport, worshiped with the same holy reverence as America’s actual favorite pastime: going to church.
But like religion, it’s a practice steeped in hypocrisy. You see, for every jaw-dropping hit, there is a man underneath the helmet whose brain is slowly deteriorating.
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Filmmaker Peter Landesman’s new film Concussion, in theaters Christmas Day, dares to call out pro football for this glaring oversight, as well as the measures the league took to ensure that this disturbing reality was shielded from its legions of adoring fans.
Set in 2005, the film chronicles Dr. Bennet Omalu’s (played by Will Smith) quest to publicize chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative disease found in American football players who’ve been exposed to repeated brain trauma. Omalu, a forensic pathologist and neuropathologist, discovered evidence of CTE in the brain scans of numerous ex-NFL players. When he attempted to bring his findings out into the light, he found himself being denigrated and threatened by the league.
Landesman was formerly an award-winning journalist for The New York Times Magazine, so it should come as a bit of a surprise that the “paper of record” has been very critical of Concussion from the get-go, including a heavily scrutinized piece in September in which the Times recontextualized several emails exhumed in the Sony hack to attempt to prove that the filmmakers altered Concussion to appease the NFL. But the emails didn’t actually prove much, other than that the makers of the movie were trying to cover themselves legally by not including any scenes that took too much creative license and could get them sued by the league. That included a scene axed from the script featuring NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell that seemed borderline defamatory.
“If there were roadblocks I didn’t see them or we blew through them,” Landesman tells The Daily Beast. “I never had any relationship with the NFL. They didn’t try to step in front of the train or hold up a hand. The best defense is the truth. It’s a true story. Even a corporate entity like the National Football League can’t keep a lid on it forever. We had a big studio, a big movie star behind us, and the truth.”