'The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee'

“I worked closely with Sally Quinn. She trusted me and that was the biggest thing for me, having Sally’s trust,” director, producer John Maggio told Hollywood on the Potomac about his HBO Documentary on her late husband. The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee premiered at The Newseum in Washington, DC and airs on December 4th, 8 PM on HBO. “Everybody across the board from Kissinger to Woodward and Bernstein to Brokaw really wanted to partake in the film. They wanted to tell not just the little Ben chestnuts, but the real Ben story.” It has been nominated by The Producers Guild of America for its top documentary award and couldn’t be a more timely backdrop to today’s distrust and slamming of the press. “Ben was, at the end of the day, a newspaper man,” said HBO CEO Richard Plepler, “and I can’t think of a better maxim that he would embrace than the maxim of today’s Washington Post, which is ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness.’ Nobody understood that more viscerally than he did.”

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“Ben hated lying,” Sally told us. “It drove him crazy. I think that the most important thing about this film is how important the truth is. And I think that the takeaway from this film is that it is the lie that is the enemy of the people, and not the journalists who expose it. Although he used to say we print lies every day because people lie to us, he also said that the truth will emerge.”