Paterno

Paterno is a 2018 American television drama film directed by Barry Levinson. It stars Al Pacino as former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, and his career leading up to his dismissal following the university's child sex abuse scandal in 2011. Riley Keough, Kathy Baker, Greg Grunberg and Annie Parisse also star. The film premiered on HBO on April 7, 2018. Plot As Joe Paterno enters an MRI machine in November 2011 he recalls events in his life. On October 29, 2011, Paterno wins his 409th game as head coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions football team. During 61 years at Penn State University, he helped the former "cow college" quintuple its financial endowment and build Paterno Library. At the age of 84, Paterno is so beloved as "a coach, an educator, and a humanitarian" that a statue is outside Beaver Stadium, and so powerful that when university president Graham Spanier and athletic director Tim Curley asked Paterno to retire in 2005, he refused. Inside the stadium, Spanier, Curley, and vice president Gary Schultz worry about a grand jury investigating accusations of child sexual abuse against Jerry Sandusky, a retired assistant coach. Six days after Penn State defeats Illinois, The Patriot-News reporter Sara Ganim learns that the grand jury's presentment also indicts Curley and Schultz. Although he is so traumatized by the abuse he suffered that he does not want his mother to read the presentment, high school student Aaron Fisher, known in Ganim's articles as "Victim 1", was the first to publicly testify against Sandusky. Rumors spread about "Victim 1"'s identity, and Fisher is attacked at school by other students, but his psychologist tells Ganim that Fisher and his mother repeated his story to many skeptical people to protect other children. Ganim and her editor discuss other allegations against Sandusky from 1998 and later, such as the rape of a young boy at the 1999 Alamo Bowl. They realize that the university has protected him for years.