Three hours ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Seth Abramovitchposted a q & a with “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff. The topic, naturally, is Wolff’s response to the oolah-boolah of the last 72 hours. Unlike Trump, Wolff sounds as if he’s dealing with the hailstorm in a reasonably adult fashion.
The excerpt that caught everyone’s attention concerned the all-but-inevitable movie or miniseries adaptation. Abramovitch: “What’s the situation with the movie and TV rights to the book?” Wolff: “Let me not answer that at the moment. I can say at this point no deal, but lots of things happening.”
I will fall over backwards in my chair if the Fire and Fury movie doesn’t turn out to be a Jay Roach-Danny Strong collaboration for HBO….please! And the sooner the better.
The just-right quality of Roach and Strong’s Game Change (HBO 2012), an expert, carefully measured saga of the Sarah Palin campaign meltdown of ’08 with note-perfect performances from Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson (as John McCain‘s campaign manager Steve Schmidt), not to mention Recount (HBO, 2008), Roach and Strong’s brilliant distilling of the 2000 Florida recount calamity, make this a mandatory scenario.
Getting the right actor to play Trump will obviously be crucial. The performance will have to be delivered with an absolute aversion to broad caricature. He’ll have to look and sound right, but the acting will have to be on the level of Anthony Hopkins‘ wounded-wildebeest portrayal in Oliver Stone‘s Nixon or Jason Robards‘ performance as Ben Bradlee in All The President’s Men. A flailing orangutan in a constant crisis mode, of course, but with an undertow of little-boy panic and matter-of-fact sadness. An American tragedy inflated into an epic-scaled calamity. Who should play Trump? We need to get on this immediately. The movie has to be airing by the 2020 primary season, if not by the end of 2019. That shouldn’t be an impossible task. It’s all been written down. It’s just a matter of story structure, casting and shooting.
By the way, Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio (“The Truth About Trump,” “Never Enough“) recognizes several aspects in the Wolff book.
