A news­pa­per is fil­ing a law­suit against Clint Eastwood’s new film

It’s hard­ly a recent devel­op­ment in the fil­mog­ra­phy of Clint East­wood that the two biggest buga­boos would be the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and the media. But in his lat­est film, Richard Jew­ell, their embod­i­ments in the FBI and region­al paper The Atlanta Jour­nal-Con­sti­tu­tion real­ly take it on the chin.

The most con­temptible char­ac­ter in the film would be Kathy Scrug­gs, a reporter with ques­tion­able ethics por­trayed by Olivia Wilde and based on the very real, now depart­ed Kathy Scrug­gs. The film depicts her as a take-no-pris­on­ers new­shound, will­ing to sleep with a source at the Bureau to get a scoop that she then choos­es not to cor­rob­o­rate with a sec­ond source as promised. (She doesn’t even write her own arti­cles, we learn, farm­ing the actu­al work of com­pos­ing prose out to a male colleague.)

The actu­al Atlanta Jour­nal-Con­sti­tu­tion has tak­en none too kind­ly to what they con­sid­er a defam­a­to­ry treat­ment of Scrug­gs’ career and their news­room, and as Dead­line report­ed in an item last night, the pub­li­ca­tion has filed a law­suit against pre­sid­ing stu­dio Warn­er Bros. The legal action would require Warn­er Bros. to add a dis­claimer to the top of the film ​“acknowl­edg­ing that some events were imag­ined for dra­mat­ic pur­pos­es and artis­tic license and drama­ti­za­tion were used in the film’s por­tray­al of events and characters.”

That quote comes from the let­ter sent by the Journal-Constitution’s lawyer Mar­ty Singer, in which he gives them some fight­ing words, such as ​“pur­pose­ful avoid­ance of the truth,” ​“con­sti­tu­tion­al mal­ice,” and ​“It is obvi­ous that nobody asso­ci­at­ed with the film was actu­al­ly inter­est­ed in obtain­ing the accu­rate facts from my clients.”

Warn­er Broth­ers was quick to shoot back, assert­ing that the ​“claims are base­less, and we will vig­or­ous­ly defend against them.” It goes on: ​“It is unfor­tu­nate and the ulti­mate irony that The Atlanta Jour­nal-Con­sti­tu­tion, hav­ing been a part of the rush to judg­ment of Richard Jew­ell, is now try­ing to malign our film­mak­ers and cast.”

Warn­er Bros.’ legal team believes that the dis­claimer at the end of the film – the boil­er­plate ​“The film is based on actu­al his­tor­i­cal events. Dia­logue and cer­tain events and char­ac­ters con­tained in the film were cre­at­ed for the pur­pos­es of drama­ti­za­tion” – should see them through any court case. But as the awards race heats up and both sides dig their heels in, this could bal­loon into a larg­er sto­ry about cre­ative license and what an artist owes to their subjects.

Nei­ther Scrug­gs nor Jew­ell are around today to speak out about the film, which turns this into a bat­tle between two large, monied cor­po­rate behe­moths fought for the sake of peo­ple who can’t defend them­selves. No mat­ter how this goes, it will get messy.