Pat Croce

And they were reading the article about me and how I had lied.

And that hit me like...

I'd say a ton of bricks, but a ton of bricks would have felt like a pillow compared to what that was.

I was in denial.

I kept going back to this, like, excuse of, well, the Titanic, right?

The Titanic, it's a fake movie.

It's based on a true story.

There was no Jack and Rose.

And yet what I had done was totally different.

I mean, I was literally trying to pretend that this other actor I had hired was Thomas Jones.

And...

It took me a year or two to sort of come to terms and just be like, man, I really fucked up.

I had been working that summer at the Truman Little White House in Key West.

And sort of in my onboarding at that museum, they told us to read David McCullough's Truman biography.

And it was in that book that I saw this one sentence about Thomas E. Jones and the messenger.

I had hired literal investigators to go find this person, two different guys.

And they both said, like, you know, we can't find him, but we found these two death certificates that kind of match up.

And I didn't share that with anybody because in my head, I just saw the story rolling out.

It was like we were going to tell the story and then at the end you saw the real guy.

And I couldn't get away from that story.