I can hardly wait to see this dross flop, to be crushed by the likes of The Return of Lego Batman.
Posted on 03/08/2017 8:18:06 PM PST by TigerClaws
A timely film about the vital role of the press in keeping government honest is coming together with a powerhouse cast. Steven Spielberg just said yes to direct Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in The Post, the spec script by Liz Hannah bought last fall by Amy Pascal’s Pascal Pictures. The deals are being negotiated. The film is a drama about the Washington Post’s role in exposing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, and how the Post’s editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Kay Graham challenged the federal government over their right to publish them.
The film will be co-financed by Fox and Amblin Entertainment. Fox will handle domestic distribution; international will be Amblin, through its output deals with Universal, eOne, Reliance and others. With the Fox deal, Spielberg reunites with chairman/CEO Stacey Snider, his longtime partner at DreamWorks. This marks the fifth pairing of Spielberg with Hanks, after Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal and Bridge of Spies. Streep voiced the blue fairy for Spielberg in A.I., and she is narrating the Netflix documentary Five Came Back. Spielberg is exec producing that film, and he also is one of the interview subjects in the film about WWII’s impact on cinema.
Pascal will produce with Spielberg, and Kristie Macosko Krieger (Bridge of Spies). Rachel O’Connor will be executive producer along with Star Thrower Entertainment’s Tim and Trevor White, and Adam Somner. They’ll fit this into Spielberg’s busy schedule soonest. Among others, he has been casting The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, which will star Mark Rylance and Oscar Isaac. Spielberg is in post-production on Ready Player One.
The idea is for Sully star Hanks to play Bradlee, the editor who would figure in the movie classic All The President’s Men. Streep, coming off an Oscar nom for Florence Foster Jenkins, would play Graham.
In an age where rampant web leaks of emails has left it difficult to figure out whether they are fair game or privacy invasion, the Pentagon Papers is the whistle blower equivalent of WWII, in how soldiers felt they were on the side of the angels fighting it. The classified study about the Vietnam War was commissioned by the Defense Department and revealed unreported facts about a secret dramatic escalation of troops and bombings in what was appearing to be an unwinnable war.
Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, pro-war when he started working on the study at the RAND Corporation, became convinced it should be absorbed to set future policy, and leaked the classified information to the New York Times. That paper published a scathing first installment that charged the Johnson administration had systematically lied to the public and to Congress about Vietnam.
When the incumbent Nixon administration Attorney General John Mitchell and Nixon failed to get the paper to stop, they got a federal court injunction forcing the Times to cease after three installments. The Washington Post grabbed the baton (Ellsberg gave the study to Bradlee) and published more revelations from the 47-volume study. Other papers including the Boston Globe jumped in, and Alaska U.S. Senator Mike Gravel read highlights aloud in a Senate subcommittee hearing. The floodgates had opened, and together the New York Times and Washington Post appealed to the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. The justices ruled 6-3 that the government failed to prove a harm to national security and that publication was justified by the First Amendment.
Ellsberg was arrested and charged with conspiracy, espionage and theft of government property. While Ellsberg said he was willing to go to jail to stop an unjust war, charges against him were eventually dropped when the Watergate scandal revealed that staffers at the Nixon White House were involved in unlawful efforts to discredit him by burglarizing the office of his psychiatrist.
CAA reps Spielberg, Hanks and Streep and is helping to put all this together. Hannah is repped by UTA, Echo Lake Entertainment and attorney Jeff Hynick.
Ones that hurt Hillary = evil, Russians, go arrest them.
Got it?
“The Pentagon Papers” was another liberal big deal about nothing. If you plan on going, take a lot of No Doz with you. This is going to literally be a “sleeper”.
I’m wondering when the film about the DNC hacks will be made and who will play the hero, Seth Rich.
By the time this starts filming it will be obsolete: when DJT pulls the plug on the swamp, there will be nothing to leak when government goes back to being just government and no longer the Palace Intrigue Smoke and Mirrors merry-go-round the Uniparty has turned it into.
That would be a trip. When “Da Pentagon Papers” were all the rage, I tried to read the book (a paperback three inches thick) to find out what the habub was all about. That didn’t work out. It was just another commie lib fiasco like Watergate.
LOL. The “Vital role the press plays in keeping government honest . . . “
Whatta joke . . The dishonest Enemedia is the problem and has been for decades
So we can expect a movie about the wikileaks revelation of the collusion between the MSM, NSA/CIA/FBI/DOJ/WhiteHouse, and DNC in about 50 years????
It will BOMB, and get nominated for the academy awards. That’s how Hollywood works.
Just another movie not to watch!
Apparently he was guilty of all 3. Guilty as sin, free as a bird. Where have I heard that about a Commie terrorist who later would mentor a future Commie president who aided and abetted terrorists around the world?
I see they haven’t learned their lesson from that gun control movie that was a massive flop but was supposed to have people running to president Clinton to enact gun control, or the all female Ghostbusters, or the TV series “Madame Secretary” about a female but more likable than Clinton Secretary of State.
Exactly.
Never saw any whining from the Left when the Pentagon Papers were released.
Coming from Hollywood?
NO WAY, not with the liberal "super stars" that would be involved with a production like this.
Save the money and take the kids out for miniature golf for some family fun.
How about a film about emails back and forth to a top Democrat official about pizza, pasta, walnut sauce, and $65,000-worth of pizza and hot dogs flown to the White House from Chicago! People love movies about food.
Yup. It'll draw no audience, but be lauded by the elites.
It's a form of corruption, cousin to payola.
Who is Meryl Streep gonna play? Melvin Laird?
Nations that let the press run wars become extinct.
And Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post is one of the all-time greatest scum bags.
He traded super-positive articles about JFK in order to keep the invitations coming to White House parties. He and his wife socialized with Jack and Jackie.
When Ben’s sister-in-law was murdered on the canal towpath in Georgetown (Mary Meyer was also one of JFK’s mistresses) he assisted in keeping her diary covered up and apparently it was eventually destroyed.
And this same Ben Bradlee savaged Nixon mercilessly. For all his faults, Nixon was Mr. Clean compared to JFK.
I can hardly wait to see this dross flop, to be crushed by the likes of The Return of Lego Batman.
"Timely"? How is this all of a sudden "timely"? We do have illicit recordings on the part of senior government officials, yes, but the media were colluding and covering up, not "keeping the government honest", and it was not Nixon recording but 0bama. Now the implication is that Nixon is Trump and that somehow the media are the brave protectors of the body politic once more. This isn't even good comic book fantasy.
This sort of posturing was inevitable coming after eight years of disgusting, fawning sycophancy, and it is as phony as the people producing it. Spielberg, Hanks, and Streep - from that team what else could we expect?
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