If anyone has a PDF of Rodham, the 2012 Black List script by South Korean screenwriter Young Il Kim, please send it along. James “beardo” Ponsoldt will direct the film version with either Jessica Chastain, Amanda Seyfried, Reese Witherspoon or Scarlett Johansson playing Hillary Rodham Clinton. Pic will focus on HRC’s days during the early ’70s when she was lawyering on the House Judiciary Committee that was looking into impeaching Richard Nixon.
Chastain would be the wise casting call, I would think. Seyfried looks like Clinton did in the early ’70s, but she doesn’t exude enough of a contentious-attorney snapdragon mentality. But Witherspoon could do this by bringing back Tracy Flick.
Clinton decided against running for elective office on her lonesome and instead bet on a marriage to Bill Clinton, whom she saw as a fast, intelligent thoroughbred with whom she could rise to power. Which she did, of course, making it to the White House in ’92 and hanging on for eight years and then Hillary suffering public betrayal, etc. But that didn’t hurt her in the least and in fact helped her when she ran for a U.S. Senate seat from New York State and later as a Presidential contender against Barack Obama in 2008. I will vote for Hillary in 2016, for sure, although I would also vote for Elizabeth Warren.
I’m just a little bit scared of Ponsoldt these days because of that absolutely careless way he shot that Miles Teller driving scene in The Spectacular Now.
I wrote the following during last January’s Sundance Film Festival: “Ponsoldt and Teller have taken the ignore-the-road aesthetic to a whole new level in a scene in The Spectacular Now, a decent Sundance flick about a teenage drunk that I saw two or three days ago.
“Teller, a 25 year-old playing an 18 year-old, is driving down a suburban road when a car with a couple of girls pulls up on his left side and starts cruising at the same speed. Both parties roll down their windows and start chatting, and Ponsoldt and Teller blow Hollywood’s “four or five seconds of eye-contact for every one or two seconds of road-watching” rule out of the water. Teller — this guy is bold as brass — just fucking stares at the women in the car and ignores the road altogether…nine, ten, twelve seconds! Go for it, Miles!
“Two little kids could have run out in front of Teller’s car and he would have flattened them like a flesh pancake. An elderly man who’s fallen out of his wheelchair could be crawling across the road and Teller would have come along and turned him into a pile of blood, broken bones, brain matter and hamburger.
“I mentioned this to Ponsoldt yesterday when I ran into him at the Prospector, and he laughed in his usual charming way and said I need to ask Teller about this. Ask Teller?”
Imagine running into Stanley Kubrick in 1963 and mentioning a problem you had with Peter Sellers‘ performance as Claire Quilty in Lolita, and Kubrick listening and then going, “Yeah, maybe…but you should ask Sellers about that, not me. I’m just the director.”
