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Spotlight · written by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy · 2015
Scene 70 of 143 · ≈ 1 min on screen · Act two
The Boston Globe's Spotlight team pries open the Catholic Church's decades-long cover-up of child abuse — one sealed record, one silenced victim at a time.
Robby's Spotlight team operates comfortably inside its own routine, prospecting a modest police-corruption story under a departing editor's cover.
Baron's outsider question exposes what the paper has never done: investigate whether Cardinal Law knowingly protected an abusive priest.
The team sets aside its own project and enters unfamiliar territory: survivor networks, a hostile plaintiff's lawyer, and a legal fight to unseal church records.
The team pays the cost of the work — hearing survivor testimony, chasing MacLeish's stonewalling, and combing church directories for a hidden pattern of reassigned priests.
Ben, stunned by Sipe's estimate, presses Robby and Mike for harder proof than one researcher's metric before he'll believe ninety.
Robby proposes working the directories backward, searching by suspicious designation to identify abusive priests instead of confirming known ones.
The team fans out cross-referencing hundreds of directory entries, circling priests marked 'sick leave' or 'unassigned' and logging them into a growing spreadsheet late into the night.
This scene
Mike sits in the pizza joint, marking up a directory, two others beside him. A waiter delivers a pizza and a beer. Without looking up, Mike reaches for the beer, keeps working.
84A EXT. PORTER SQUARE T-STOP, CAMBRIDGE, MA - MORNING
Sacha waits for the T, working on a directory.
84B INT. GLOBE, LIBRARY - DAY
From the crow’s nest above, we see Mike and Matt at the table in the library, stacks of directories between them.
84BB INT. GLOBE, CAFETERIA - DAY 84BB
Robby sits alone in cafeteria, working on a directory.
84C EXT. BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY, DOWNTOWN BOSTON - DAY
Sacha walks up the grand steps, enters the massive library.
84D INT. GLOBE, SPOTLIGHT - DAY
CLOSE ON the spreadsheet. More names are entered. We scan down the growing list of priests...
84F INT. GLOBE, LIBRARY - NIGHT
Mike in a back aisle, works on the directories.
85A INT. BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY, READING ROOM - EARLY EVENING 85A
A beautiful, mostly empty reading room, green banker’s lamps everywhere. Sacha works late, directories all around her.