How does shattered glass end

This is probably one of the few movies that can make unanswered phone calls and busy dial tones interesting, as the phone numbers and emails he provided lead to only dead ends. See, the climax of the movie is when everything comes tumbling down and it becomes obvious the story Stephen Glass wrote — and The New Republic published as a front-page story — is completely made up. In the aftermath of what you see in the movie, the staff found that 27 of his 41 articles were either entirely made up or based on real events with fabricated quotes.

See, he was in law school at the time and his time at The New Republic haunted him into that profession as well. In his application to the California Bar, it admitted 36 of his stories were at least partially fabricated.

However, Stephen's latest printed story begins to be questioned by journalists at Forbes online magazine, as they wished they had discovered the story, wanted to do a followup piece, but found that many of the items listed in the story could not be verified independently of the materials Stephen had given to the New Republic's fact-checkers. This work by Forbes begins an even trickier relationship between Chuck and Stephen, the latter who staunchly defends his written piece, being able eventually to back-up his sources with albeit questionable "proof".

Chuck, on the other hand, has to decide how far he will go to protect Stephen, his writer, especially as Stephen gets caught in one lie after another, about which he is able to get away with solely in his self-effacing apologetic manner which got him the support of his colleagues to begin with.

Sign In. Edit Shattered Glass Jump to: Summaries 3 Synopsis 1. The engineers of those deceptions have all been enormously likable, of course. They need to be. We are saved, from time to time, not so much by the rectitude of the Charles Lanes as by the dogged curiosity of the Adam Penenbergs.

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Rated PG for language, sexual references and brief drug use.

Hank Azaria as Michael Kelly. Peter Sarsgaard as Chuck Lane. Luke Kirby as Rob Gruen. Hayden Christensen as Stephen Glass. Melanie Lynskey as Amy Brand. Steve Zahn as Adam Penenberg. Chloe Sevigny as Caitlin Avey. Rosario Dawson as Andie Fox. He knew everything. He had a near-masochistic inability to say no to anyone in authority. It was really preposterous and cartoonish. It also made him impossible to deal with on the same level that you deal with other people.

There was some sort of a core that was missing, that core sense of confidence and security. The slightest look or gesture could send him into a panic of self-doubt. Certain friends advised him to stop asking the question; others found that it called forth their protective instincts. Those familiar with his early work said he struggled with his writing.

His original drafts were rough, the prose clunky and imprecise. Peretz had spoken frequently about how black taxi drivers in Washington were being replaced by cabbies from other immigrant groups; he thought it revealed something important about the attitudes of blacks toward certain kinds of work. The piece was a kind of audition for Peretz—a chance for Glass to shine—and he spent months on it. Early drafts were ragged, but from the outset it revealed a talent that Glass had not previously shown: a remarkable ability to weave in anecdotes and colorful detail.

Roughly a month later, Glass delivered his first lengthy story under the new regime—a 2,word article on the Center for Science in the Public Interest C. The article depicted the center as doing little more than selling hysteria with its diatribes against Chinese food, movie-theater popcorn, and the fat substitute olestra.

According to the story, the description was drawn from the anonymous account of someone who had eaten with Jacobson. But the chairperson of the board of C. In a recent interview, Kelly said that questions about the scene had been discussed during the editing process, and that Glass gave convincing assurances that he had talked to friends who had witnessed Jacobson eating. When pointed criticism of the article also came from Jacobson, Kelly fired off a private letter that Jacobson later described as one of the nastiest he had ever received.

Jim Naureckas, editor of the magazine Extra! The complaints had been on target. Glass had invented the anonymous people who had seen Jacobson eating, as well as an enormously inflammatory quote from an unnamed and nonexistent Food and Drug Administration official. When interviewed, Kelly said that he would gladly apologize to Jacobson for the opening anecdote—as long as he was given definitive proof of its embellishment.

I wish I had caught him. But it was just Stephen Glass grasping for another act. He insisted that he had spoken with all the people named in the story, and that they had reconstructed the conference for him. He was admitting a transgression, but one not nearly as serious as making up the event. Lane believed that the comment was a trap, a way for Glass to claim he had been forced to confess something untrue.

The C. At first the made-up parts were relatively small. Fictional details were melded with mostly factual stories. Quotes and vignettes were constructed to add the edge Kelly seemed to adore. Eight young men, Glass claimed, men with names such as Jason and Michael, were drinking beer and smoking pot.

The piece, almost entirely an invention, was spoken of with reverence. David A. After hearing the complaints, Kelly asked Glass to explain the apparent discrepancy. After Glass called the hotel, he reported that, while the hotel did not have mini-bars, it did supply mini-refrigerators to guests. Kelly privately called the hotel and found out the same thing. Did the young conservatives purposely buy mini-bottles of liquor? A dainty purchase, it would seem, for would-be sexual predators.

Yet Kelly focused his attention elsewhere. Glass, however, had actually worked as a fact checker at The New Republic; he even continued to do checking during some of the period when he reported. He also ingratiated himself with the new fact checkers, staying around late while they worked and marking his stories with Post-Its to assist them in quickly finding his backup materials. When fact-checking the stories of others, Glass established himself as the Darth Vader of Detail.

He took advantage of the vulnerability of Ruth Shalit, who had previously been forced to admit plagiarism in two New Republic pieces. He was always pissing on Ruth. He was always seen as the stickler, and he used that, and the fact checkers came to trust him.

Kelly left the magazine in September of Around this time, a piece Glass wrote for Rolling Stone not only contained apparent fabrications, but the few concrete details in the article appeared to have been lifted from another source. It told of the ways in which colleges and universities supplied suspect data to U. The location of the meeting was never given, nor was anyone named. Beyond the meeting, Glass cited eight specific examples of colleges and universities supplying questionable data to U.

What he did not say in the piece is that seven of those examples had been published two and a half years earlier by The Wall Street Journal in its own groundbreaking story on the U.

News rankings. Still, Glass grew more emboldened. By the beginning of , he had begun to routinely invent stories almost in their entirety.

A possible explanation is that now, in addition to his many magazine assignments, he was attending Georgetown University Law Center. He wondered aloud if the piece had been intended as a joke. It should have been a warning to Glass. Glass and Lane were in the Honda at the corner of Abermarle and Wisconsin, near a Hechinger retail store, when Glass burst into tears.