Joe Paterno's greed

There was one bit of advice I heard for screenwriting.

In a movie, the characters have to have a clear, obvious motive for their actions. It can't be psychological. You need some concrete reason.

For example, if you were making a movie about Joe Paterno and the Penn State child rape scandal, what motive would you give Paterno for covering up Jerry Sandusky's crimes? That he didn't want to disturb people before the weekend (one of the the excuses he gave for not calling police)? That he didn't know it was physically possible for a man to rape a boy (he actually said this)? That he loved Penn State football so much that he would do anything to protect it from scandal?

Or would you show Paterno as a callous millionaire, unwilling to do anything that might undermine his power to continue raking in millions of dollars in university funds and as perfectly happy to see impoverished boys victimized by the predator Sandusky, perfectly happy to work with a man he knew to be a serial child rapist, as long as he made his millions?

That's pretty much how it happened.

Paterno was head coach for forty-five years. And for about a quarter of that time, he was covering up for a child molester.

There's an article about it now from The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/sports/ncaafootball/joe-paterno-got-richer-contract-amid-jerry-sandusky-inquiry.html?pagewanted=all 

From the article:

In the end, the board of trustees — bombarded with hate mail and threatened with a defamation lawsuit by Mr. Paterno’s family — gave the family virtually everything it wanted, with a package worth roughly $5.5 million. Documents show that the board even tossed in some extras that the family demanded, like the use of specialized hydrotherapy massage equipment for Mr. Paterno’s wife at the university’s Lasch Building, where Mr. Sandusky had molested a number of his victims. 

The details of Mr. Paterno and his family’s fight for money seem to deepen one of the lasting truths of the Sandusky scandal: the significant power that Mr. Paterno exerted on the state institution, its officials, its alumni and its purse strings.

Penn State students rioted when Paterno was fired. They were siding with a millionaire against boys, some from foster homes, all of them poor, all of them fatherless, who Sandusky molested.