Rebecca Hall plays Christine Chubbuck, a reporter who committed suicide during a live broadcast, in Craig Shilowich’s film “Christine.” Photograph courtesy of The Orchard

One morning in 1974, Christine Chubbuck, a twenty-nine-year-old newscaster in Sarasota, Florida, began her live-broadcast talk show reading from a script. “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first—an attempted suicide.” Chubbuck raised her right hand from below the desk. She was holding a silver .38-calibre pistol. She pointed the gun behind her right ear, pulled the trigger, and fell forward. Her skull struck the desk with a thud.

Thirty-six years later, a young film producer named Craig Shilowich started writing a screenplay about Chubbuck. He read news clips, but had trouble finding people who had known her well. Those who hadn’t died had disappeared. After years of searching, Shilowich gave up. He had talked to a few of Chubbuck’s contemporaries at Channel 40, visited a few other small TV stations in Florida, and found footage of her show. With that material, he finished making the movie.

“Christine” premiered at Sundance in January, with Antonio Campos directing, Rebecca Hall as Chubbuck, Michael C. Hall as her colleague “handsome George,” and Tracy Letts as her despised boss. Critics praised the film. “This is a thrumming, heartsore, sometimes viciously funny character study, sensitive both to the singularities of Chubbuck’s psychological collapse and the indignities weathered by any woman in a nineteen seventies newsroom,” Guy Lodge wrote in Variety. Of Hall’s performance, The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Hall makes it impossible to look away from this portrait of a woman brought to the heartbreaking conclusion that she’s beyond hope.” But the same review also questioned the film’s commercial viability: “How curious today’s audiences will be about that bizarre story remains a big question.” Twelve days later, to Shilowich’s relief, The Orchard, a subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment, bought the film’s North American distribution rights.

When The Orchard went in search of a trailer house (a company that makes film previews), however, it encountered more ambivalence. The companies it approached didn’t get the movie. (One executive described it as a “marketing challenge.”) Premières were scheduled, and time was running out. Then, in June, an executive at The Orchard heard from a guy named Smitty. His trailer house, InSync Plus, had a top-drawer reputation, most recently for its work on the “Spotlight” campaign. Smitty said he wanted to make the “Christine” trailer. In fact, he felt compelled_ _to do it. Why? Four decades before, when he was twenty-two, he had worked with Chubbuck at the TV station in Sarasota. Not only that, he had been her closest friend there.

Shilowich got a series of texts about InSync Plus taking the job. The last text in the thread read, “Smitty knew Christine.” Shilowich thought it was a typo. It wasn’t until he got on a conference call with Smitty and his team that he realized who Smitty was. Shilowich had searched for him for years, but had known him by a different name—Rob Smith. As Sally Quinn wrote in the Washington Post, Chubbuck had told “Rob Smith, 22, the night news editor,” that she had purchased a gun. “What for?” Smith asked. “Well,” Chubbuck replied, “I thought it would be a nifty idea if I went on the air live and just blew myself away.”

In late September, Shilowich, who lives in Brooklyn, travelled to Los Angeles for a screening of “Christine” and a cast party at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He also wanted to meet Smitty in person. On a broiling hot morning the day after he arrived, he took an Uber to an office in Koreatown. Tall, bearded, thirty-four, he wore shorts and an orange T-shirt. Smitty appeared in the foyer. “Craig!” The two men hugged. Smitty, who is sixty-five, had a silver hoop earring and an onyx-and-diamond ring on his right pinky.

Up in his office, Smitty showed off the view: “Hollywood sign, Griffith Observatory, San Gabriel Mountains, the entire L.A. skyline.” He had a strong Philly accent. “There are nights when the sun shines off the reflective glass and it’s so beautiful I can’t leave,” he said. Shilowich sat on a leather couch with a pillow featuring the bear from the Mark Wahlberg movie “Ted.” “So how did you get—here?” he asked.

“That’s a freaking long story,” Smitty said. “It goes through Florida, obviously.” After dropping out of N.Y.U., he said, he transferred to New College, in Sarasota. He studied film, took LSD more than a hundred times, and then, in 1973, got a job writing copy for WXLT Channel 40, where Chubbuck worked. People called it the “Funny Forty.”

“There was no romantic interest,” he said. “We were just friends. We talked a lot, got along great. Funny lady, you know? But I have a warped sense of humor. I dug her. And, when she went into morbid land, I never took it seriously because she always started laughing.” Smitty paused. “I probably wasn’t mature enough to know she was trying to reach out.”

Chubbuck was ambitious, hardworking, and smart, but she struggled with mental illness in a time when the lexicon for what she suffered—and ways to help her—didn’t exist. She had trouble relating to people and making friends. Her workplace didn’t help. WXLT-TV was a makeshift operation, struggling financially, scraping by with old equipment and an inexperienced, underpaid staff expected to work around the clock. Hoping to increase ratings, the owner of the station pressured his reporters for juicier, more sensational stories—“If it bleeds, it leads.” Chubbuck hated this approach, clashed with the news director, and grew increasingly angry and frustrated as her features were overlooked or bumped by so-called harder news.

On the day Chubbuck killed herself, Smitty got a call. “I went down and I saw the tape. I’ll never forget—our program director was dubbing version after version. And we’re going, ‘What are you doing?’ And he’s saying, ‘Everybody’s gonna want this, CBS, NBC, they’re all gonna want it.’ We’re like, ‘You can’t show this shit! This is horrible.’ So the family got involved, and the owner put a clamp on it.” Smitty shook his head. “I saw it once and I didn’t need to see it anymore. It didn’t look real.”

“It just looked fake, like a bad joke or something?” Shilowich asked.

Smitty nodded. “That was something that Chris would do. I can see her doing a fake suicide more than anybody.”

“How do you process something like that?” Shilowich asked.

“It was hard to process initially, because there was so much media,” Smitty said. “I was getting calls from Japanese reporters. From the University of Michigan grad school—doing a class in deviant behavior.”

“Did you go to her funeral?” Shilowich asked.

“Nope,” he said. He paused. “I was really pissed at her. I thought it was so wrong.” His bottom lip quivered slightly. He kept his eyes straight ahead.

“This view is incredible,” Shilowich said.

Shilowich first ran across Chubbuck’s story six years ago, in the middle of the night, while he was failing to write another screenplay about an unusual death. Her story hit a nerve. He had been a film student at N.Y.U., “and I had a breakdown, basically,” he said. He returned to his parents’ home, outside Philadelphia. “It was a dark, painful time. I couldn’t tell how I got in or came out. So, when I saw her story, I thought, if that hadn’t gotten better, if the medication hadn’t worked, if I had been a woman in the seventies, maybe I would have gone over the edge, too.” He wanted to get beyond the reductive, five-word description of Chubbuck’s final act that you read online, and create a portrait of a person in pain—someone who tried her best every day, and then stopped trying. “Christine” is Shilowich’s first produced screenplay.