Lance Oppenheim’s film dramatizes the events surrounding a fatal To Catch a Predator sting in Texas, drawing from reporting by Luke Dittrich.
A24 will release Primetime in theaters on Friday, adapting a longform investigation into Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator. Directed by Lance Oppenheim, the primetime movie dramatizes the program’s operations and features Robert Pattinson as host Chris Hansen. Debut screenwriter Ajon Singh wrote the script, which draws from Luke Dittrich’s article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die.”
Dittrich, a New York Times bestselling and National Magazine Award-winning writer, was approached nearly 20 years ago by Dave Katz, who was then an editor at Esquire. Dittrich lived an isolated life in the Yukon Territory with his toddler-aged daughter. When Katz emailed him about the assignment, Dittrich was in Chile on his way to run a marathon in Antarctica. He hadn’t watched the show, but after viewing archived episodes on his laptop, he begged Katz to let him travel to Dallas as soon as he returned.
Reporting on the Texas sting
The story centered on the suicide of assistant district attorney Bill Conradt in Murphy, Texas. Dateline NBC had partnered with the watchdog group Perverted Justice, which caught Conradt expressing sexual interest in an adult posing online as a 13-year-old boy. Conradt killed himself just as the camera crew prepared to enter his home for what was intended to be a real-time sting.
Dittrich took two long reporting trips in and around Dallas. Several central sources refused to speak with him during his first days in Texas until he interviewed other people tied to the case. In a motel room, Dittrich worked to copy raw NBC footage with a DVD burner purchased at a local Circuit City so he could quickly return the discs to a source. He interviewed a detective named Gator who broke down sobbing, walked through the house where Conradt died, and had what he described as a contentious conversation with Hansen for the article’s final section.
The road to the screen
After the article was published, Dittrich moved on to other assignments. He didn’t follow Hansen’s career, though he occasionally heard Hansen had spoken negatively about the piece on a podcast. Dittrich also worked as a consultant on the documentary Predators. Roughly three and a half years ago, Range producer William Iannaccone emailed Dittrich to ask whether the film rights to the piece were available. Dittrich agreed to sell the rights, and Oppenheim went on to direct the adaptation. Dittrich visited the set during production, and the movie arrives in theaters on Friday.
