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Steven Spielberg Announces Pentagon Papers Film Starring Tom Hanks And Meryl Streep
Steven Spielberg in May 2016. (Photo by Clemens Bilan/Getty)
It could be argued that all art is political, but, clearly, some works are more on the nose about it than others. To this, it may seem no coincidence that, in the age of Trump, Steven Spielberg has announced his latest project, The Post, which will tell the tale of The Washington Post's role in publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
The Pentagon Papers were one of the most famous and influential leaks in American history. As Coming Soon explains:
Written and leaked by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers established that the Johnson Administration had lied to the public and congress about US military involvement in the Vietnam War, and revealed that the Nixon administration had secretly escalated the war. The Nixon administration tried to stop The Post from publishing them, and Assistant U.S. Attorney General William Rehnquist took the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the paper. The late Jason Robards won a 1974 Best Supporting Actor Oscar portraying a Watergate-era Bradlee in All the President’s Men.
Spielberg's film, co-financed by his own Amblin Entertainment as well as Fox, will star Tom Hanks (as the Post's then-editor Ben Bradlee) and Meryl Streep (as Katharine Graham, the paper's then-publisher).
According to Deadline, Amy Pascal, the former head of Sony Pictures, will produce the feature. Pascal bought first-time writer Liz Hannah's spec script for the project last year.
The Post will mark Hanks's fifth on-screen collaboration with Spielberg, while Streep has worked with the director before in A.I., but never on-screen.
As Variety notes, Spielberg is currently finishing work on the sci-fi feature Ready Player One, and is concurrently in pre-production on The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.
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