Acclaimed award-winning
filmmaker Steven Spielberg has signed on to direct Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks
in The Post, a zeitgeisty spec script written by Liz Hannah centered on press'
role in keeping the government in check.
The Post
follows the Washington Post's role in exposing the dubbed Pentagon Papers in
1971, and its editor Ben Bradlee (to be played by Hanks) and publisher Kay
Graham (to be played by Streep) fight with the federal government over their
rights to publish them.
Acquired last
fall by Amy Pascal's Pascal Pictures, the project will be co-financed by Amblin
Entertainment and Fox, with Amblin dealing with international distribution, and
Fox domestic.
The film marks
the fifth time Hanks and Spielberg pair after Saving Private Ryan in 1998,
Catch Me If You Can in 2002, The Terminal in 2004, and Bridge of Spies in 2015.
As Streep, the film will be the second time working with the director after
having voice a character named Blue Mecha in Spielberg's 2001 sci-fi drama AI.
"The Pentagon Papers was
the name given to a secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political and
military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, prepared at the request of
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967. As the Vietnam War dragged
on and the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam increased to more than
500,000 troops by 1968, the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg (who had worked on
the study) came to oppose the war, and decided that the information contained
in the Pentagon Papers should be more widely available to the
American public. He secretly photocopied the report and in March 1971 gave the
copy to The New York Times, which subsequently published a series of articles
based on the report’s findings. Amid the national and international uproar that
followed, the federal government tried unsuccessfully to block publication of
the Pentagon Papers on grounds of national security." - History
Spielberg is currently in post on Ready Player One, and is casting The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, which will star Mark Rylance, and Oscar Isaac.
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