‘Something had gone radically wrong.’ Inside the magazine story that inspired A24’s ‘Primetime’

Twenty years ago, while reporting a story from the hinterlands of Antarctica and South America, Luke Dittrich received an unexpected email from an editor at Esquire: Had he heard of “To Catch a Predator,” the hit NBC show hosted by journalist Chris Hansen? (He hadn’t.) And had he heard anything about the recent episode where things had gone terribly wrong? (Someone — assistant district attorney Bill Conradt Jr. — died by suicide in his Texas home as Hansen’s camera crews waited outside the back door.)

“I managed to get on some sort of wonky internet [connection] and pulled up a postage stamp-sized [video] and watched on NBC’s website some of their archived episodes,” Dittrich says. “I found it immediately compelling.”

By then, the show had been on the air for a couple years. And its premise was simple: Hansen orchestrated elaborate sting operations wherein he confronted men who arrived at houses, allegedly thinking they were meeting up with teenage boys and girls. Hansen would then reveal evidence of lewd messages these men had sent to members of Hansen’s team who had posed as children, dramatically accusing them on camera of their transgressions. The formula yielded dramatic police take-downs and emotional confessions, making the show both a hit and a lightning rod for criticism.

That is, until Conradt’s suicide.

In a 12,000-word narrative feature that would eventually become the the basis of A24’s latest hit film, Primetime, Dittrich set out to untangle a complicated question: Should entertainment and law enforcement collide to this extent?

In this edition of Depth Perception, Dittrich discusses the sensational appeal of Hansen’s TV show debacle, the painstaking groundwork it took to report the story, and what it was like to see his work come to life on the big screen two decades later. — Kelly Kimball

In your interview with The Hollywood Reporter last month, you said: “I’m a lousy critic. It’s a struggle for me to figure out what makes something good or powerful. I can just engage with it with my feelings and go from there.” What feelings came up in you when researching this story, and how did you use them to direct the writing?

I found it, at a visceral level, a fascinating show, and I think it remains a fascinating show. It’s one of those things that you can’t really take your eyes off of, in part because you’re seeing … a series of real people’s lives ending in real time. And there’s always these fascinating moments where it sinks in [for the accused child predators on the show] what’s going on, and you see their faces change. I think that is something that, for some very kind of primordial human reasons, appeals to us. There’s some part of us that loves watching people go down or loves watching people in their most extreme moments of duress. It’s not necessarily a noble instinct, but I think it’s an instinct that we all, at some level, share.

At the same time, I found that these people that you’re watching go down were very creepy and seedy, and this whole netherworld of the internet that’s depicted on the show is revolting. I’m coming at it as somebody who had a toddler-aged daughter who, after watching the show, I’m like “Well, I’m not going to let her get online until she’s, you know, in her 30s.” But at the same time, I was watching it with this growing feeling that there was something kind of off about the show. I couldn’t really say what it was, but along with its spectacle and these compelling scenes, you also started wondering whether it was crossing certain lines that shouldn’t be crossed. And I think that’s ultimately what the story explored — this increasingly fuzzy line between law enforcement and entertainment that “To Catch a Predator” ultimately straddled, and obviously the repercussions that the blurring of that line can cause.

This is something that both the film and your article do quite well: Asking a series of questions about the relationship between not only law enforcement and entertainment, but perhaps even journalism, law enforcement, and entertainment. As a journalist, what ethical questions did you find most fascinating?

The question was posed most succinctly by one of my sources on that story, who was a judge who had reviewed a bunch of the “To Catch a Predator” cases. [They] asked the question of whether at a certain point either NBC had become an agent of the local police, or whether the local police had become agents of NBC. Either way, something had gone radically wrong, and at that point the question becomes: What kind of forces were driving this troubling intersection of two entities that really shouldn’t be impacting one another, which I think they clearly did, certainly down in Texas anyway.

Long story, short: Catching up with Anna Kurkurina, the subject of ‘Lifting Ukraine’

 

Since 2022, Russia has pounded southern Ukraine, attempting to make it uninhabitable by bombing villages, destroying water supplies, and wreaking havoc on its infrastructure. Amid the chaos, survivors have endured — including thousands of stray animals orphaned by the war. Record-setting powerlifter Anna Kurkurina has been rescuing and rehoming countless of these injured and unhoused pets, showing just one way how Ukraine’s “volonteri,” a loose network of civilian helpers central to the country’s fight for freedom, has bolstered its battle-worn government.

In Lifting Ukraine, a Webby Award-winning series of intimate photos and videos by photojournalist Maranie Staab, Kurkurina’s daily struggles and triumphs are laid bare as she attempts to uplift the most vulnerable inhabitants of her city, Mykolaiv. Rescuing pets left to scavenge the rubble of airstrikes, strength-training disabled children, and feeding an ever-growing pack of four-legged houseguests, the three-time world champion muscles through her days demonstrating unwavering strength in the face of seemingly endless war.

Still fighting and keeping Ukraine strong, Kurkurina recently coached a team of young powerlifters to victory. Among them was Dmitry Zakrevsky, who won first place in his category and second in absolute. (Watch his winning effort here.)

Learn more about Kurkurina and how she’s inspiring her community to fight by reading Lifting Ukraine today.

You do quite a lot of groundwork for this piece. You made two trips to Texas, you walked through the home where the suicide of the assistant DA took place, you spoke with countless people including Hansen himself, and you obtained and viewed reels of raw footage from NBC from the night this all took place. What moments in your reporting ended up being the most essential to crafting the narrative?

I think getting a hold of the footage was certainly a pivotal moment in the reporting, and that took me a while to get a hold of. As with many reporting projects, you start out kind of scrambling to talk with everyone you can and you have a lot of doors closed in your face. Then if you’re lucky, and you have this luxury of time, you keep on circling around different people that you know you want to [have] eventually open up to you.

What happened to me in Texas was, eventually, some of the critical sources that initially were hesitant to talk to me, I eventually talked with enough people in their orbit that could then report back to them and give them a sense of what I was like and how it didn’t seem like I was necessarily out there to do anything particularly sensationalistic. At which point, I got a lot, including a bunch of raw footage from NBC.

I was given the DVDs that contained this raw footage, and [was] told that I could only hold on to them for like six hours before I had to return them back to the source. So I went to a local Circuit City — which no longer exists — and bought a DVD burner, which I’d never used [before]. I sat in this motel room with my laptop, furiously trying to figure out how to work this DVD burner so I could make copies of these files before the six-hour deadline elapsed.

There’s a mixture of this very slow process going on, and then there’s always these moments of heightened pressure. But again, a lot comes down to what I mentioned before: the luxury of time. I did get to spend two extended periods of time in Texas. Had I been doing this as an on-the-spot newspaper story, there’s no way I could have gotten a fraction of the information that I ended up being able to weave into the story, and that’s not to mention [how] I had the luxury of space. Esquire was ultimately very generous in how much space they allowed me to tell the story with. Every writer knows the feeling of turning in a first draft and then being told that you have to lop half of it off. In this case, I remember I turned in my fat first draft, and my editor Dave Katz said, “You know, just give us more if you need to. If you need to write 14,000 words instead of 9,000, do it.” So I had time, I had space, and I had people who were willing to ultimately be very open and candid with me.

At the center of the story is Chris Hansen himself, who you’ve said was one of the last people you spoke to for the piece. I understand your interaction with him was tense. What was it like spending those many months reporting and writing the story, and then toward the end being able to finally speak with Chris. Did he come across as you expected?

He may have been the very last interview that I conducted for that story. And I spent the whole story, almost months up to that point, amassing more and more questions for him. One of the things that stands out from the interview is that I wished it could have lasted for hours longer. I had pages and pages of questions and was only able to get to some of them.

[If anything] his voice surprised me. By the time I spoke with him. I’d been steeping in his voice and image for months, and I certainly knew his TV persona, by that time, inside and out. I think one of the interesting things about Chris Hansen, at least in my limited experience with him, is that there is very little daylight between his TV persona and his person. It was a strange experience hearing his voice for the first time, because he does have such a distinctive voice, and I kept on expecting him to drop one of his catchphrases, but he never did.

As for whether or not the interview was useful, it certainly was. I got information from him that I’d been seeking, and it also interestingly took a turn toward the contentious when we started. I mentioned something that he outright denied, and then I was able to prove that the thing that I had said had taken place, and that’s when things got a little contentious. Ultimately the story isn’t about Chris Hansen. I mean, Chris Hansen, I suppose, is the avatar for this large machine that’s operating behind him.

What was it like selling the rights to your film, and what level of involvement did you have in crafting the film that we see today?

In my experience, Esquire’s contracts were always very specific about allowing you, the writer, to maintain ownership of the pieces that you wrote after this limited publication window. The actual rights to the text revert to the writer, which is fantastic. My understanding is that not all magazines at the time did that. So, the rights did belong to me.

And I think those conversations themselves aren’t necessarily that rare. I think it is rare, though, for something to [actually] get made. The fact that this got made, I think, is a testament just to the creative powerhouses that are behind it — starting with this guy Will Iannaccone who is producer at Range [Media Partners].

The Primetime project started a little less than four years ago, and Will reached out to me out of the blue and said, “You know, I read this article of yours. I loved it and I was wondering if the rights were available.” And so we hopped on the phone and talked a little bit. And he really impressed me with this pretty clear vision that he had for this dark, propulsive black comedy of a film that would draw inspiration from the article. So I put him in touch with my agent and we worked out an options deal.

At the time, I still was just crossing my fingers, and wasn’t going to be holding my breath because I knew that it’s not something that often pans out entirely. And then I was extremely, pleasantly surprised to find out two and a half years later or so, that the movie was in fact in production, and that A24 was involved.

What was it like being on set?

I got to go down to New Orleans while they were filming, which was an amazing experience in itself, very surreal.

It was just really impressive to see these people who are all at the tops of their games creatively. Being on a movie set, period, is interesting. I’ve seen good acting before. We all do on the screen, right? But I hadn’t seen good acting at that close range. And then you see these super powerful scenes, and then how they can just reset in 30 seconds and give another take that’s just as powerful but has some sort of different nuance going on. It’s very impressive, in part because it is so far outside of my personal comfort zone and wheelhouse.

I didn’t have a clear sense after my visit to the set exactly what the story was going to be. I still hadn’t read the screenplay itself. I only saw the movie for the first time a couple weeks ago. I wasn’t going through rough cuts or giving any sort of creative input, and that was sort of what I wanted. It was nice to have this thing completely out of my hands and see what they were going to do with this story.

As I’ve taken to describing it, my article and Primetime share some DNA, but they’re completely different animals, and they both sort of stand on their own two feet. And I love that about these two parallel but extremely distinct projects.

Further reading from Luke Dittrich:

• “‘Heavenly Father!’ ‘I love you all!’ “I love everyone!” “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”
• “Chuck Berry Goddamn!” (Esquire, Dec. 18, 2011)
• “Four Days on the Border” (Esquire, June 7, 2009)
• “The Brain That Couldn’t Remember” (The New York Times, Aug. 3 2016)
• Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness and Family Secrets” (Vintage, March 8, 2017)