Hollywood took the man who spent twenty years walking into kitchens and telling child predators to have a seat, then handed his name to Robert Pattinson and called the result art. Chris Hansen is not playing along.
On My View with Lara Trump, the host of the old Dateline sting To Catch a Predator looked at A24’s new thriller Primetime and called it what the trailer already gave away. Entirely a work of fiction. Extremely dark, twisted, and dramatic. No more to do with his work, he said, than a Scooby-Doo cartoon. Purely fictional. Excessively controversial. And, the line that matters, an insult to the thousands of men and women who try to protect children from predators every day in this country.
That is not a publicist’s shrug. That is a man watching his life’s work get turned into a ratings ghost story so a studio can sell tickets.
They used the name and threw out the work
Primetime opened September 25 after a Venice premiere, directed by Lance Oppenheim from a script by Ajon Singh, with Pattinson in the Hansen role. The film is built around the 2006 boom year of the NBC stings and the death of Louis William Conradt Jr., a Texas assistant district attorney who took his own life as police arrived at his home with warrants tied to an online investigation. That death was real. The movie wrapped around it is not.
Hansen has been saying the same thing since the trailer dropped. In a Fox News interview late last month he put it plainly. Nothing in that trailer except the actor saying his name and “have a seat” ever happened in real life. He was not consulted. A24 came calling in May, a day before the trailer, asking him to help sell a picture he had no hand in. He has called that sneaky. He has talked about lawyers. He has also said Pattinson is a good actor who has been gracious. The grievance is not with the performer. It is with a studio that wanted the brand and not the man.
The filmmakers have been unusually honest about the dodge. They have said they did not need him because the movie is fiction, only “based on” one year of the show, drawn in part from an old Esquire piece and the public record. That is a convenient rule. Fiction when the subject asks why his name, his wife’s name, and his catchphrase are on the poster. Nonfiction when the marketing department needs people who still remember the stings to buy a ticket.
Timelines got moved to make the myth work. An alleged rendezvous with a Florida reporter that surfaced years later, in 2011, gets pulled back into the 2006 story so the on-screen Hansen can be a philanderer and a fame hound in the same breath as the Conradt case. Hansen has denied the infidelity claims. The point is not the gossip. The point is that a dark drama about ego is easier to market than a news magazine that put men on camera after they drove across town expecting a child.
The real seat is still in the kitchen
Scripture does not leave this category of evil in the gray. “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” The men who showed up at those houses were not misunderstood antiheroes. They had already done the chatting. They brought the condoms, the liquor, the excuses. Hansen’s job was to walk in and make them say it out loud before the cuffs.
He told Lara Trump the dramatization risks the thing these cases cannot afford. It pulls eyes off the victims, their families, and what they are living through, and parks them on a neon thriller about a television host. He pointed to groups that have stood with the actual work, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the National Center for Victims of Crime, ChildUSA, and the Child Rescue Alliance. He has been at this more than twenty years. Through his TruBlu investigations he claims a conviction rate over 99 percent. Viewers who watched the original stings, he said, will spot the inventions without a fact-checker.
Hollywood’s answer has been the usual one. Praise the performance. Call the subject morally muddy. Treat public shame of predators as the real scandal, and the predators as set dressing. Hansen has a shorter version. This is an industry once led by Harvey Weinstein, now patting itself on the back for a dark and mysterious take on the guy who exposed the men in the chat rooms.
He bought the ad before the feature
Hansen did not settle for a podcast rant. He paid for the seats. Thirty-second spots running before Primetime on thousands of screens, about 3,500 in the first month by his count, with the real Chris Hansen walking into a kitchen and telling the theater to have a seat. The pitch is simple. The crime has more platforms than ever. The real work continues every day on TruBlu. A QR code does the rest. He told Lara Trump the buy has worked out very well. It is also the rare case of a subject purchasing the last word in the same room as the fiction.
He is shopping a documentary, I’m Chris Hansen, that he cooperated with, so the record is not left entirely to A24. In the meantime the old advice still holds, and it has nothing to do with Pattinson’s accent. Predators moved from AOL and MySpace to whatever the kids are on this month. Hansen’s line to parents has not changed. Tell them it can happen. Tell them to come to you. Do not punish them. Do not yank the phone as the price of honesty. Solve it together.
That is the work. A studio thriller can borrow the catchphrase. It cannot borrow the kitchen, the warrant, or the child who was supposed to be on the other end of the chat. Have a seat is not a movie line. It is what you say when the man who came for a child finally has nowhere to stand.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Starting the Day With a Scripture-Inspired Roast Helps Center Your Thoughts on Eternal Truths Amid Temporal Pressures
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