Paul Lieberman beat the odds when his Los Angeles Times series about a mob-fighting police unit became a motion picture, "The Gangster Squad," to be released this fall. He tells how it happened in this article from the Winter Nieman Reports. "The desire to have the best — or most salable — story must never undermine our responsibility to challenge even our most compelling material," he writes. "A commercial film, on the other hand, thrives on embellishment."
January 29, 2012