Script is ready for TV movie about Goldschmidt's 'Fall from Grace'.

Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard

The moment Bryce Zabel heard that a Portland newspaper had broken a story about former Oregon Gov. Neil Goldschmidt's 30-year-old sexual abuse of a child, the Eugene TV anchor-turned-Hollywood producer figured it was a journalistic blockbuster with potential to become a compelling movie.

The Pulitzer Prize board will formally confirm that Zabel was right in the first part of his gut reaction, when it awards journalism's top prize for investigative reporting Monday to Willamette Week reporter Nigel Jaquiss at its annual New York luncheon, a month after the awards were announced.

That award could help Zabel realize the second half of his hunch, by lending some national distinction to the made-for-TV movie script he has written about Goldschmidt's rise to prominence and his downfall after Willamette Week's expose revealed that the former Portland mayor and Oregon governor had for three decades concealed his sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl.

"There are probably a thousand people in Hollywood who would like to option a Pulitzer Prize-winning story after it's won the Pulitzer Prize," Zabel said in a telephone interview. But Zabel said he has been working on the project for 11 months already.

In that time, Zabel has interviewed more than 20 people, including state Sen. Vicki Walker, a Eugene Democrat who helped Willamette Week with its Goldschmidt coverage by furnishing Jaquiss with a court document she had received from a different Portland journalist.

Drawing on those interviews and Willamette Week's published accounts, Zabel has written a script for the USA Network about the Goldschmidt saga, called "Fall from Grace," and formed a partnership to make the movie with the Hollywood television production company Von Zerneck-Sertner.

The process isn't far enough along for Zabel to know whether his project will get the green light, but he's optimistic.

Willamette Week editor Mark Zusman said he and Jaquiss are negotiating option rights for the film, which would allow Zabel and Von Zerneck-Sertner to use the newspaper's articles as a basis for the movie and to portray the two journalists in it.

Zusman said that aside from a few phone calls and meetings the two have had with Zabel, they're not spending much time pondering the possible movie.

Willamette Week's expose came out on May 12, 2004. Soon afterward, Zabel heard about it from someone at the Oregon Film and Video Office, which he'd been in contact with regarding a possible fictional TV series, to be set in Portland, about the country's youngest mayor.

Given the parallel to Goldschmidt - who was the country's youngest mayor of a major city when he took office in 1973 at age 32 - the Willamette Week scoop didn't bode well for the youngest-mayor TV project, Zabel said. But it sparked a new idea.

"When I first heard about the story breaking, I instantly was riveted by it, having grown up in the Portland area and having observed Neil Goldschmidt's career," Zabel said. "It's a compelling story because of its tragic dimensions: A person who has accomplished so much good in a public and political way has also been responsible for a lot of personal pain."

Zabel, who produced the "Lights, Camera ... Oregon!' fund-raising extravaganza in January for his alma mater, the University of Oregon, was in the state last May for meetings about that event. So he arranged for a breakfast meeting with Jaquiss to discuss his movie idea.

Zabel, who graduated from the University of Oregon in 1976 with a journalism degree, worked as a TV news anchor at Eugene stations KVAL and KEZI before taking a job with CNN in Los Angeles in 1980. He eventually left journalism to go into entertainment. He served three years as chairman and CEO of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. He has been credited for creating, developing, or writing for network television dramas including "L.A. Law" (NBC, 1986); "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" (ABC, 1993); and "Dark Skies" (NBC, 1996-97).

His current projects include a miniseries, "The Poseidon Adventure," which is to air next fall on NBC, and "Blackbeard the Pirate," a movie for the Hallmark Channel that starts shooting in July.