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Lance Oppenheim On Venice’s Most Uncomfortable Premiere

"I was so confused by 'To Catch a Predator'—was it a prank show? Was it a news show? Was it a circus with Chris Hansen as a ringleader? I think about Hansen as a journalist, as an entertainer. But I also really think of him as an artist."

Sleaze trumped prestige at Venice this week with the world premiere of docudrama Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s opportunist take on an opportunist journalist. Chris Hansen’s gotcha news program To Catch a Predator, a scuzzy spin-off of the more sober broadcast newsmagazine Dateline NBC, reveled in pedophile sting operations in small towns across the country—and turned legally dubious entrapment into must-see TV when it ran from 2004 to 2007.

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Primetime, which opens September 25, revisits the show’s 2006 heyday, when audiences were so riveted by the hit reality television show that NBC pitted it against ABC’s ratings juggernaut, the surreal crashed-plane survival serial Lost. And it paints a damning portrait of the ambitious Hansen (Robert Pattinson, also the film’s producer), making him a win-at-all-costs showman who craved respectability while delivering cheesy catchphrases like “Why don’t you have a seat over there?” and “You see how this looks, right?” with a lurid drawl.

“Obviously I hope he likes the movie,” said Pattinson, a bit incredulously, at the press conference. “I would hope in some ways that the amount of inspiration........

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