The NYT has a feature today on Rod Lurie’s new film, which is called Nothing But the Truth and is about a reporter who goes to jail after refusing to divulge sources in a case involving the outing of a female spy. The Times story is mostly about how the movie isn’t really about Judith Miller, and will probably be an infuriating read to anyone who followed that case.*

I’m more interested in a different question. How did Rod Lurie get to direct this movie? The most notice he’s gotten recently is as the creator of Commander-in-Chief, the D-level, poor man’s West Wing about a female U.S. president, who was played by Geena Davis. “You can smell the history,” one of her aides intoned in the premiere. The show barely made it through one season. That wasn’t history, sparky.

Lurie’s last film was Resurrecting the Champ, about a reporter who meets a homeless guy who says he was once a championship boxer. The reporter writes the story, basks in the attention, and then finds out that—get this—the crazy homeless guy he met wasn’t telling the truth. In Lurie’s movie, this was all told with great import, as if great ethical questions were being examined.

Actually, as I wrote at the time, there weren’t any actual ethical implications in the film. This wasn’t a Jayson Blair-like story of deliberate falsification. The reporters and his editors were just … stupid. It was basically about incompetence, I guess. The reporter’s editor never actually said, in the film, “Don’t bother checking that story out, let’s just print what a crazy guy told you as fact!”, but that’s basically what happens.

It gets worse, too, but that’s all in the original thing I wrote about it. Lurie was trying to get some attention by trying to play into the idea of the press as morally and ethically compromised. (The real-life events he based the film on featured the much-less-interesting fact that the reporter found out the guy wasn’t telling the truth in the normal course of reporting the story.) Anyway, here’s the punchline. Resurrecting the Champ—which starred Samuel Jackson and Josh Hartnett—was such a huge flop last year that people didn’t really notice it was a flop. According to Box Office Mojo, it grossed $3 million total, more than half of that its opening weekend. (In other words, it grossed $1.6 million in wide release its first three days out.) Within a week and a half it had a per-screen average of $37.

Few went to see Shattered Glass, Billy Ray’s quite respectable look at the Stephen Glass case and the gold standard of recent movies about the press. How did Rod Lurie get to make another movie about journalism?

Reviews for the film haven’t come out yet; it’s not even clear if it has a U.S. distributor. The film’s web site says that Roger Ebert called it a “spellbinding thriller,” but the link doesn’t work.

* Just for starters: It’s written not by a film staffer but the Times’ Supreme Court reporter, meaning that little matters like Lurie’s louche career go unexamined; beyond that, Judith Miller is allowed to appear  forthright, saying she was wrong about her Iraq-has-WMD’s scaremongering in the Times, but the story doesn’t dwell on the years she doggedly defended herself or the substantive criticism leveled against the paper itself, not least from its public editor. Also, Liptak includes bogus bit of PR, that the actress in the film passed a polygraph while in character. Polygraphs sense stress and nervousness, neither of which an actress would be in that situation. She was just working!