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Before Jayson Blair made headlines for his plagiarized New York Times reporting, Stephen Glass defamed the weekly current events magazine The New Republic with a series of eye-catching, entertaining, and completely fabricated stories. Now Glass' trail of lies gets the big-screen treatment in writer/director Billy Ray 's Shattered Glass , featuring Hayden Christensen in the title role. The film chronicles Glass' time at the magazine in the late '90s, when his colorful coverage of a hedonistic Young Republican convention, superstar web hackers, and the circus surrounding the Bill Clinton / Monica Lewinski scandal made him the toast of the publishing world, garnering attention from such national publications as George and Rolling Stone . Barely out of college, the eager Glass ingratiates himself with the office staff, including his mentor, managing editor Michael Kelly ( Hank Azaria ). But when Kelly is unceremoniously fired and replaced with editor Chuck Lane ( Peter Sarsgaard ), Glass' pieces come under a greater degree of scrutiny, until one in particular threatens to expose his tall tales to the rest of the world. Based in part on a Vanity Fair article by journalist Buzz Bissinger , Shattered Glass premiered at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals before its limited fall theatrical release. — Michael Hastings
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