A reality television program leads to ultimate tragedy in Director Lance Oppenheim’s biographical crime-drama, Primetime.

Inspired by Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire article, “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” Oppenheim’s film recreates the atmosphere and production of NBC’s Dateline segment To Catch a Predator, which used decoys and volunteers from the group Perverted-Justice to trap suspected child molesters but was cancelled after a sting operation resulted in a suicide and a massive lawsuit.

On October 3, after the DGA membership screening in New York, Oppenheim discussed the making of Primetime during a Q&A moderated by Director Molly Gordon (Theater Camp).

During the conversation, Oppenheim spoke about his use of various cameras on the film.

“We knew we wanted to shoot with the cameras that To Catch a Predator had used so, we consulted Mitchell Wagenberg who was a hidden-camera operator on the show. He mentioned they had used over 50 different camera bodies and formats. It seemed like a mess, in a beautiful way. I liked that idea and told [DP] David Bolen we should adopt that same language — we were going to shoot most of the movie digitally, but we should process that and find a way to print it to 16mm later, so it feels almost corrupted or bootlegged. We also shot with this Plumbicon tube camera and had these DV cameras, which I would actually hide on set. I felt like the hidden cameras did something to the performers when they were doing the interrogation scenes. I remember shooting these scenes with Alex Winter, who was incredible, and I would say, ‘Okay, we’re doing three takes Alexa, three takes Plumbicon tube camera.’ Everyone was just like, ‘What? Can’t you just choose one?’ And I was like, ‘No, I want to treat this like a process where I can absorb and shoot as much material as possible, so that Dan Garber, who’s cut almost all of my documentaries, outside of Ren Faire, can treat this like a documentary-style edit.’ I wanted this film to have the ability to rebuild and blow things up and move things around and take lines and put them in different places. It creates almost an atmosphere or a subjectivity that you wouldn’t access otherwise. I liked that I could do these things with this film because, again, the film is about something that has been refracted. I feel like every time I think about Chris Hansen, I’m looking at him through, like, five layers of glass.”

Primetime is Oppenheim’s narrative feature debut. His other directorial credits include the documentary features You Can See Everything, Spermworld and Some Kind of Heaven; and episodes of the documentary series Ren Faire. He has been a DGA member since 2021.