Last week it was announced that HBO will team with director Jay Roach and producers Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman for an adaptation of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann‘s Game Change, a forthcoming book about the Trump vs. Hillary battle. Halperin and Heilemann have already made similar hay with The Circus, a Showtime series that ran all through ’16, as well as the currently streaming Trumped: Inside The Greatest Political Upset of All Time.
The forthcoming HBO docudrama, which could hit as soon as ’18 but more likely the following year, is now in conflict with a nearly identical-sounding miniseries (announced on 2.14) that Zero Dark Thirty‘s Mark Boal will produce with Annapurna’s Megan Ellison, and which Boal will write the screenplay for. If HBO’s project follows the mold of the 2012 Game Change about the ’08 election, it’ll run 120 minutes while the Boal-Eillson will run “eight to ten hours.” But they’ll both still be telling the same story.
HE to Boal: “Mark — You’re now in a race with Mark Halperin, John Heilemann and the Game Change guys. You have to have a different angle in mind, right? Something that will exceed or expand upon what they’re almost sure to do? It wouldn’t hurt to be first either. My guess is that besides going more in-depth with your eight-to-ten-hour running time, you’re going to play the Russia card (i.e., the Christopher Steele dossier) and maybe even allude to the pee-pee tape just to keep things interesting.
“What else will distinctively separate your miniseries from whatever Halperin-Heilemann may have in mind? Can you give me some kind of vague hint about your plan of attack? Or do you care about any of this stuff?”
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