What do you do when your President will stop at nothing to crush the oh-so-vital press and keep reporters out of the White House and keep the truth at bay and instead tell the press “alternative facts” and the spirit of journalistic voices are feeling the weight of his boot? You make “The Post,” a new political drama being directed by Steven Spielberg to star A-list icons Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, about the important role that The Washington Post played in revealing the Pentagon Papers to the American people back in 1971.
Hanks and Streep will play the two most important people in the true-life story that “The Post” is based upon.
Hanks’ character is Ben Bradlee, the editor of The Washington Post, and Streep’s is his publisher Kay Graham. Both Bradlee and Graham risked their careers by taking on the federal Government in order to get the Pentagon Papers published.
‘The Post’ is written by a first-time writer
Liz Hannah is the screenwriter who made her first sale with “The Post,” who was lucky enough to pre-empt this theme of journalists versus the White House becoming hot-button and topical, and lucky enough that Hanks bought an espresso machine for the journalists and feels for their plight and is therefore getting involved in the picture. She’s also lucky enough generally to have sold a spec script to a major Hollywood producer, which is much more of a rarity than it should be, given the calibre of talent out there with screenplays they can’t get produced (check my bio, Hollywood).
Pascal Pictures (owned by Amy Pascal, the disgraced Sony executive who left the company after North Korea hacked her emails and revealed all the racist things she said about then-President Barack Obama) is the company that originally bought Hannah’s script for “The Post” back in last autumn, when it was just a nice story from 1971 and not a pertinent and current and socially relevant and A-lister-attracting Oscar-bait drama.
But now it is and Spielberg, Hanks, and Streep have happily signed up. But it might not be relevant for long, given how quickly hot-button issues cool off and disappear (remember when Ebola was going to kill us all until two weeks later everyone forgot about it?), so they’re going to have to act fast to get “The Post” made and in cinemas while they still can.
Spielberg and Hanks’ fifth collaboration
Barring the HBO miniseries they produced together, “The Post” will mark the fifth Film collaboration between Spielberg and Hanks, whose past efforts are “Saving Private Ryan,” “Catch Me If You Can,” “The Terminal,” and “Bridge of Spies.” Streep will likely have signed up immediately, given her outspoken disdain for President Donald Trump. She has only previously worked with Spielberg in a very small voice role in “AI” and in narrating the upcoming Netflix documentary “Five Came Back,” on which Spielberg is an executive producer and interviewee.
