READ MORE ABOUT: Cops, Preachers and Serial Killers: Casting the Film/ Re-creating 1920s L.A.: Locations and Design

ON THIS PAGE:  Legacy of a Mother's Love: Christine Collins is Remembered/ Eastwood, Imagine and Jolie Team: Changeling is Greenlit/ Clint Eastwood and screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski

Mrs. Collins told her story clearly, stating that from the first  she was convinced the boy was not her missing son… She was subjected to an exhaustive examination by President Schweitzer, who wound up asking her what happened shortly before she was taken to the County Hospital. "I was requested to appear before Captain Jones," she said.  "In the presence of several others, he said: 'What are you trying to do, make a lot of fools out of us all? Are you trying to shirk your duty as a mother and have the State provide for your son?  You are just a fool.'"
--Los Angeles Times, October 17, 1928, reporting on Mrs. Christine Collins at Police Commission Hearings

Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby, Unforgiven, Letters from Iwo Jima) directs Angelina Jolie (The Good Shepherd; A Mighty Heart; Girl, Interrupted) and John Malkovich (Dangerous Liaisons, Beowulf, upcoming Burn After Reading) in an emotional and provocative drama based on actual events that forever transformed the city of Los Angeles. 
Changeling tells the story of one woman whose invincible spirit and refusal to surrender brought down a corrupt police department and ushered in a new era of dignity and equality under the law.
Los Angeles, March 1928: On a beautiful Saturday morning in a working-class suburb, single mother Christine Collins (Oscar^® winner Angelina Jolie) says goodbye to her nine-year-old son, Walter, and leaves for her job as a telephone operator.  But when Christine returns to their modest home, she is confronted with every parent's worst nightmare: her son has vanished. 
An exhaustive and fruitless search ensues, but Walter has disappeared without a trace…until five months later, when a child--claiming to be her boy--is returned by police who are eager to bask in the public-relations coup of reuniting mother and child.  Dazed by the swirl of cops, reporters, photographers and her own conflicted emotions, Christine is persuaded to take the boy home.  But in her heart, she knows he is not Walter.
As she pushes authorities to keep looking for her real son, Christine learns that in Prohibition-era L.A., women don't challenge the system and live to tell their story.  Slandered as delusional and unfit, she finds an ally in community activist Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), who helps her fight the city to look for her missing boy. 
Facing corrupt police who question her sanity and a skeptical public hungry for a fairy-tale ending, Christine desperately hunts for answers.  As she searches, she becomes an unlikely heroine for the poor and downtrodden who have been systematically abused and swept aside by the police state that has gripped L.A.  Now, one woman's quest won't stop until she finds her son…unless those assigned to protect and serve silence her for good. 

BEFORE THE PRODUCTION: Legacy of a Mother's Love: Christine Collins is Remembered
The history of Los Angeles is marked by sensational tales of corruption, cover-ups and murder during the city's formative years.  From the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle rape and murder trial of young starlet Virginia Rappe in 1921 and the kidnapping of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in 1926 to the Black Dahlia murder in 1947, scandal has long permeated the city and shone unfavorable light upon her political operatives. 
But it was the little-remembered story of one working-class woman's struggle--amidst insurmountable odds--to find her missing son that would, almost 80 years later, forge a partnership between several of Hollywood's most highly regarded filmmakers.  The incredible tale of Christine Collins was one that almost vanished to obscurity before a former journalist stumbled upon her sensational, poignant story.
Within the subterranean halls of Los Angeles City Hall, the dusty archives of city business dating back almost 100 years are housed.  Among these tens of thousands of pages of documents lies the public record of Christine Collins and the City Council welfare hearings from the late 1920s.  They tell a patchwork tale of the disappearance of her young nine-year-old son, Walter, and the corrupt machinations of the Los Angeles Police Department during and after the flawed investigation of the case.     
Several years ago, screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski, a former journalist who has written for Los Angeles Times, The Herald Examiner and Time, among other publications, stumbled across this astonishing story of a working-class woman who brought down a political machine.  As the adage is written, a reporter is only as good as his sources, and Straczynski knew he had a lead when a longtime contact phoned him up.
Recalls the screenwriter: "A source I had at City Hall called one day and said they were burning old records and that there was something I should take a look at before they put it into the incinerator.  So I zoomed down to City Hall, and they had a transcript of a City Council welfare hearing in the case of Christine Collins.  I began reading the testimony and thought, 'This can't actually have happened.  This has got to be a mistake.'  But it was enough for me to get hooked before the book went into the fire."
Los Angeles in 1928 was in the grips of a despotic political infrastructure, led by Mayor George E. Cryer and enforced by Police Chief James E. "Two Guns" Davis (often photographed in a gunslinger pose with his weapons) and his sanctioned gun squad that terrorized the city at will.  That despotic rule began to unravel when Collins, a single mother raising a son in a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles, reported her nine-year-old missing.  Months of fruitless searching followed, and the police had nothing to show, save an onslaught of negative publicity and mounting public pressure to find a solid lead in the kidnapping.   
When a boy claiming to be Walter was discovered in DeKalb, Illinois, Christine Collins--and all involved in the search--waited with bated breath.  Letters and photos were exchanged, and the authorities believed the missing persons case had been solved.  Collins scraped together the money to bring the boy home, and LAPD organized a very public photo-op reunion with the found child and anxious mother.  Hoping to put a stop to the scrutiny surrounding their inability to solve this case and others--and desperate for uplift from human-interest success to counter the string of corruption scandals--members of the department felt the reunion could spell public redemption for LAPD's top brass. 
The only problem was that the child who arrived home was not Walter. 
Despite her immediate and repeated declarations that the boy returned was not hers, Collins was rebuffed by the officer in charge of her case, Captain J.J. Jones.  She was told--as recounted from the City Council hearing transcripts of the day--to "try him out for a couple of weeks."  Confused and disoriented, she agreed.
Case closed.
Until three weeks later, when Collins brought "Walter" back, insisting that, no matter what anyone said, this child wasn't hers.  Unaccustomed to having their actions questioned by anyone, let alone a woman, Captain Jones--with the tacit approval of Chief Davis--subjected Collins to slander and committed her to the County psychopathic ward as a patient, instead of admitting the mistake of returning the wrong boy.  Collins would be forced to spend five harrowing days in the psychiatric ward, housed against her will due to a "Code 12"--a term that referred to a difficult or inconvenient person, usually a woman, jailed or committed to the local psychopathic ward without a warrant or any legal due process. 
The child who reappeared as Walter later admitted to being 12-year-old Arthur Hutchens (who also used the alias Billy Fields), a Midwest runaway who wanted to come to Hollywood in hopes of meeting his favorite film actor, Tom Mix.  At a roadside café in Illinois, a diner remarked that he had an astonishing resemblance to the kidnapped Collins boy of Los Angeles.  Hutchens hatched a plot to turn himself in to local authorities as the missing Walter, have Christine Collins pay for his bus fare to Los Angeles and provide room and board.  His actions unknowingly set off a chain of events that would forever alter the policing of Los Angeles' residents.
For Straczynski what was, at first glance, astonishing became increasingly compelling the more he dug into the details of the case.  He researched the story for approximately a year, digging through the intricate details of Collins' seven-year journey to find answers surrounding her son's disappearance.  What he found was even more disturbing than Hutchens' hoax.  Underneath the dusty files emerged a parallel case--one that told the depraved details of child predator Gordon Northcott (alternately admitting and then denying the killing of the still missing Walter Collins) and the unyielding power and violence of the Los Angeles authorities of the period.
The screenwriter also discovered a man named Gustav A. Briegleb, a Presbyterian minister who assisted Collins in her search for answers.  A longtime thorn in the side of the establishment, the community activist was a voice of authority whose radio show and powerful sermons challenged listeners not to turn a blind-eye to police corruption.  Briegleb worked with Collins and her attorney to ensure that Walter's story was not buried and Collins' inhuman treatment in the mental ward was revealed to all who would listen.  Their work led to the dismissal of senior civic leaders and exposed corruption that was commonplace in the day.
Although Collins died in 1935 not knowing what happened to her son, Straczynski sums up just how powerful her legacy was: "The core of it all is Christine Collins' desire to find out what happened, and never giving up, no matter what anyone threw at her.  She never abandoned the quest to find out what happened to her son.  That tenacity carried her through things that would break anybody else, but she never once stopped fighting.  That reverberated throughout the state's legal system, and I wanted to pay tribute."
Straczynski admits of drafting his script: "My intention was very simple: to honor what Christine Collins did.  My job was to tell the story as honestly as I could and honor the fight she waged and how she never once lost faith and kept looking for her son.  Her simple question: 'Where is my son?' brought down the entire L.A. city structure."  To add to the veracity of his story, the writer would pull quotes verbatim from the files…along with other direct testimony he incorporated into the film's script.
Screenplay finished, Straczynski would begin the search for filmmakers and a Christine Collins who could honor the story of not only this pioneer in victim's rights, but a champion of the people.  He would find that in Clint Eastwood, Imagine Entertainment and Angelina Jolie.  It was a proud moment for Straczynski, whose previous script work had been predominantly in the genre of television science fiction.  Changeling would be his first produced feature film.   

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION:  Eastwood, Imagine and Jolie Team: Changeling is Greenlit
The shocking "based on actual events" story caught the attention of Academy Award^®-winning producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, who have excelled at bringing real-life stories to the big screen--notably with such critical and box-office successes as American Gangster, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, Friday Night Lights and Apollo 13.
"There is an excitement for me when drawing from a true story," remarks Grazer.  "I liked the subject matter of Changeling, found the culture surrounding this incident to be fascinating, and in some ways appalling, but it captivated me.  The fact that it did happen gives this story so much more emotional gravity."
Knowing director/producer Clint Eastwood had a similar sensibility when it came to fact-based material, Grazer and Howard called the filmmaker to discuss the script they had optioned.  "I took it with me on a trip to Berlin," recalls Eastwood.  "On the way back on the plane, I read it and I liked it a lot.  As soon as I got in, I called Brian and Ron and said, 'Yeah, I'll do this.'  And they said, 'Angelina Jolie liked the script and wants to do this.'  I said, 'She'd be great.  I like her work a lot.'  And that's how it came about--very quick and simple."
Eastwood's longtime production partner, Rob Lorenz, was just as awestruck as others who had read Straczynski's tale.  "I was about 15 pages into the script, and I had to flip back to see if it was really a true story; it was just so amazing to me," Lorenz remarks.  "Joe [Straczynski] had done something very clever.  He stuck photocopies of news clippings every 15 or 20 pages in the script, just to remind you it was true.  I was not only amazed it was all true, but astonished that I had never heard of the story before and nobody seemed familiar with it."
With their interest piqued for a script in which Eastwood found the "truth was stranger than fiction," Eastwood and Lorenz agreed with the Imagine Entertainment team that the unbelievable events would make a captivating film, as long as Academy Award winner Angelina Jolie took the role as the working-class single mother who made it her life's mission to find her boy.  Of his Christine Collins, Eastwood remarks, "Angelina is unique.  She reminds me a lot of the actresses from the Golden Age of movies in the '40s--Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Susan Hayward, all of them.  They were all very distinctive, and they all had a lot of presence.  She's a tremendous actress."
Howard and Grazer were pleased with the outcome on all fronts.  Notes Grazer, "I bought Changeling's script and, like everybody does, created a list of the top directors in the world.  You start with your dream and you work your way down.  I started with a dream and got it with Clint Eastwood, and then to have Angelina Jolie step into this role was very exciting.  She is just perfect for it.  She's so emotionally available, alert and present."
Despite a riveting story and the high-caliber filmmaking team, Jolie was initially reluctant to tackle the role of a mother whose son is kidnapped.  Understandably so, as she had recently finished a heartbreaking portrayal of Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart, the true story of the kidnapping and execution of journalist Daniel Pearl.  However, she was willing to explore options and read the screenplay.  Straczynski's interpretation of Christine's tale changed her mind.
"It's an extraordinary story," Jolie reflects.  "I couldn't stop reading it.  When she faced a setback and would get back up, I'd think, 'Good, you're back up.'  Christine Collins is a woman whom I came to admire but, as an actor, there was a lot about the story I didn't want to do.  I didn't want to do a film about a child being kidnapped, because I think there's something to bringing certain things into your environment, in your thoughts and in your world.  But ultimately, it was her strength when faced with such odds that swayed me.  I'm most fond of this story because of how it exposes corruption of those in power.  It's very timely; we still deal with that today."
With the director, producers and lead actor in place, Eastwood and the other filmmakers began their search for the other players in Christine Collins' late 1920s and early '30s world--the men and women who would shape the story of Changeling.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
After more than 30 years as a filmmaker, CLINT EASTWOOD (Directed by/Produced by/Music by) continues to produce award-winning pictures.   Most recently he earned dual Academy Award^® nominations in the categories of Best Director and Best Picture for his acclaimed World War II drama Letters from Iwo Jima, which tells the story of the historic battle from the Japanese perspective.  In addition, the film won the Golden Globe and Critics' Choice awards for Best Foreign Language Film and received Best Picture honors from a number of film critics groups, including the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review.  Letters from Iwo Jima is the companion film to Eastwood's widely praised drama Flags of Our Fathers, which tells the story of the American men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima in the famed photograph.
In 2005, Eastwood received Academy Awards^® for Best Picture and Best Director--his second in both categories--for Million Dollar Baby.  The film also earned Oscars^® for Hilary Swank (Best Actress) and Morgan Freeman (Best Supporting Actor) and nominations in three more categories (Best Actor for Eastwood, Best Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay).  In 2003, Eastwood's critically acclaimed drama Mystic River debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, earning him a Golden Palm nomination and the Golden Coach Award.  Mystic River went on to earn six Academy Award^® nominations (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay), winning two (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor).  In 1993, Eastwood's foreboding, revisionist western Unforgiven received nine Academy Award^® nominations (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Editor and Best Sound) and went on to win four (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Editor).  Eastwood also received the Academy's Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1994. 
The Golden Globes first honored Eastwood in 1971 with the Henrietta Award for World Film Favorite.  In 1988, he was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement.  The following year, he was honored with the Golden Globe Award for Best Director for Bird, and in 1993, he was awarded Best Director for Unforgiven.  Nominated in 2004 for his direction of Mystic River, Eastwood took home his third Best Director Golden Globe Award in 2005 for Million Dollar Baby.  He was also nominated in 2005 for his score to that film.
In addition to the Thalberg Award and DeMille Award, Eastwood's many other lifetime career achievement awards include honors from the Directors Guild of America, the Producers Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild, the American Film Institute, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the French Film Society, the National Board of Review, the Henry Mancini Institute (Hank Award for distinguished service to American music) and the Hamburg Film Festival (Douglas Sirk Award).  He is also the recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor, awards from the American Cinema Editors and the Publicists Guild and an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Wesleyan University and is a five-time winner of Favorite Motion Picture Actor from the People's Choice Awards.  In 1991, Eastwood was Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatrical Society's Man of the Year, and in 1992, he received the California Governor's Award for the Arts.
No stranger to the Cannes Film Festival, Eastwood served as president of the jury in 1994 and has garnered Palme d'Or nominations for White Hunter Black Heart in 1990, Bird in 1988 (which won for Best Actor and Best Sound) and Pale Rider in 1985.

Screenwriter J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI (Screenplay by) was born in New Jersey but raised all across the United States, having moved more than 20 times in his first 17 years.  He began selling articles and short stories by the time he graduated high school and spent the next 14 years as a journalist, writing for Los Angeles Times, San Diego Magazine, Penthouse, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Los Angeles Reader and Time, Inc.  In the course of that work he also picked up two bachelor degrees from San Diego State University in clinical psychology and sociology, with minors in literature and philosophy.
In 1986, Straczynski jumped ship from journalism to television, starting first in animation, then moving on to write for such series as The Twilight Zone; Murder, She Wrote; Jake and the Fatman; Walker, Texas Ranger; Crusade; Showtime Network's Jeremiah; and Nightmare Classics, for which he received a Writers Guild Award nomination.  He also created and executive produced the double Hugo Award-winning series Babylon 5, for which he wrote 91 out of 110 produced episodes and received the E Pluribus Unum Award from the American Cinema Foundation, two technical Emmy awards, the Saturn award, the Ray Bradbury Award and many others.  In 2006, he wrote, produced and directed Babylon 5: A Call to Arms, a direct-to-DVD short film for Warner Bros. 
Straczynski also writes for Marvel Comics, including "The Amazing Spider-Man" (since 2001), "Fantastic Four," "Thor," "Bullet Points," "Dream Police" and "The Book of Lost Souls."  His comic work has received the prestigious Eisner Award and the Inkpot Lifetime Achievement Award.
After finishing Jeremiah, Straczynski dedicated himself to film work.  In addition to the production of Changeling, he has adapted World War Z for Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment and Paramount Pictures; They Marched Into Sunlight for Tom Hanks' Playtone and Universal Pictures, with Paul Greengrass attached to direct; a new Silver Surfer feature for 20^th Century Fox; and he has rewritten Ninja Assassin for the Wachowski Brothers and Joel Silver, now in production.  He is currently rewriting The Grays for Wolfgang Petersen and Sony Pictures and has sold two more spec scripts--Proving Ground to United Artists and Tom Cruise and The Flickering Light to Imagine Entertainment and Ron Howard, for whom he has also just signed to adapt the famous science fiction novel series "The Lensman."