Oscar Contender ‘Cover-Up’, National Board Of Review Winner, Puts Investigative Journalism Legend Seymour Hersh At Center Of Story

Going back to the 1960s, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has broken story after story of immense national and international importance: the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, the testing of chemical and biological weapons on U.S. soil, the Abu Ghraib scandal, Watergate, the CIA meddling in domestic politics, and much more.

At age 88, Hersh is still working scoops, as seen in the documentary Cover-Up, the award-winning film directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus that’s a strong Oscar contender. The feature, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, debuts on Netflix December 26 following a theatrical opening on December 19.

Watch an exclusive clip from the documentary below.

Hersh’s reporting notebooks, filled with details of interviews with sources, could probably fill a warehouse. For those who care about the importance of investigative journalism and its critical function in a democracy, the tablets might be considered sacred.

Hersh shared his dog-eared legal pads scribbled with jottings with the filmmakers, but not without great hesitation. He expressed ambivalence despite having worked with Obenhaus on three previous investigative films and knowing Poitras’s reputation as the Oscar-winning director of Citizenfour, about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

“We had very strict protocols” about the notebooks, Poitras told Deadline just before the Venice Film Festival. “And this is something that comes from my work with Edward Snowden, very strict protocols about who saw what and what could then ultimately be seen on the screen and what gets redacted. And there was no way that we were going to do anything that would put any of his sources at risk, but yet he was still sharing his notebooks. So there was this need to trust this core group.”

Somewhat ironically, given Hersh’s skill at getting other people to talk, he didn’t prove any more enthusiastic about opening up regarding his private life. The dance between filmmakers and “hermetically sealed” investigative journalist provide moments of comedy in a film that otherwise plays as a thriller. The stakes of Hersh’s reporting, of course, couldn’t be higher.

“I think [he’s] without peer,” Poitras told Deadline recently in a conversation for our Doc Talk podcast recorded at Doc Stories in San Francisco. “In terms of the importance of the stories that he’s broken, in terms of his consistent position in an adversarial relationship to government power across time, across administrations, exposing wrongdoing, obviously with My Lai [during] the Vietnam War. And it changed the war; it changed the course of the war. People understood differently what was happening. And he’s also consistently not just trying to break the stories, but understand the systemic kinds of failures, abuse of power, how high up does it go? I mean, that’s the title of the film, Cover-Up. He’s not just trying to just do the first pass on a story, but deep, deep dives. He’s been obsessed with Henry Kissinger and his long career of corruption and abuse of power globally. He broke a lot of stories about Kissinger and then wrote a big book. In terms of his reporting in the Iraq War, the Abu Ghraib torture story again lifted the veil on what was happening.”

Poitras added, “He’s always just been consistently kind of allergic to lies and bullshit and abuse of power.”

Last week, the prestigious National Board of Review named Cover-Up the best documentary of the year. It also won the Maysles Brothers Award for Best Documentary at the Denver Film Festival, Honorable Mention for Best Feature Documentary at the IDA Documentary Awards, and the David Carr Award for Truth in Non-Fiction Storytelling at the Montclair Film Festival (an award named for the late New York Times journalist).

The Cinema Eye Honors named Seymour Hersh one of its Unforgettables from the year in documentary. Watch the exclusive clip from Cover-Up below, which gives a sense of what makes Hersh both an extraordinary journalist and a compelling personality.