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Last night I read a recent draft of Liz Hannah‘s script for The Post, the forthcoming 20th Century Fox film about the Pentagon Papers crisis of 1971. It’s a good script, but my initial dream that it might be some kind of definitive Pentagon Papers saga or a tense newsroom thriller along the lines of Spotlight or All The President’s Men turned out to be…uhm, just that.

The Post, which will topline Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, will begin filming in May under director Steven Spielberg and be released in December. It’s about how Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham (Streep), who initially saw herself as less than ideally suited to the task and was little more than a blandly embedded figure in Washington social circles, gradually grew some courage and a sense of journalistic purpose during the Pentagon Papers episode, which transpired over a 17-day period in June 1971.

Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, exec editor Ben Bradlee in the early ’70s.

Hannah’s script is about a testy, at times caustic relationship between Graham and exec editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) when the N.Y. Times published Neil Sheehan‘s report about Daniel Ellsberg‘s Pentagon Papers documents (which proved that the stated motives and justifications for the Vietnam War were dishonest and deceptive) and the Post debated whether to publish a trove of similar docs, also from Ellsberg, and stand up to the Nixon administration’s legal challenges and threats.

The Post is basically a middle-aged woman’s self-empowerment saga. The project was hatched and nurtured along by producer Amy Pascal.

I wrote the following to a critic friend this morning: “I had no idea Mrs. Graham was so mushy-minded, such a slow-boater, so reluctant to accept the responsibility of first-rate, big-city journalism…even after the N.Y. Times had published the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Post (not Bradlee but Graham, the lawyers and others) was still hesitating, still unsure about whether to publish more of the same…the draft I read is 118 pages and for over 70 pages my constant thought was ‘when is Mrs. Graham going to wake up and man up?’

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There’s never been any question in my mind that Straw Dogs is Sam Peckinpah‘s second-best film, The Wild Bunch being first and Ride The High Country being third. It’s a dark, creepy, ugly film, and yet wholly, primally fascinating. It certainly contains one of Dustin Hoffman‘s strongest-ever performances. The editing by Paul Davies, Tony Lawson and Roger Spottiswoode, especially during the violent finale, is flat-out brilliant. And yet John Coquillon‘s muted, grayish cinematography looks pretty good on the 2011 MGM Bluray — actually the best-looking version I’ve ever seen. The forthcoming Criterion Bluray (out on 6.27) is from a 4K scan and contains a lot of intriguing extras, and I’m presuming it’ll looks slightly better than the 2011 disc but you have to draw lines somewhere. Right now I’m disinclined.

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And now you’re sorry, you say? You fucked up? Okay, you get points for manning up — I respect that — but you and your kind are still the reason we’re stuck with this animal until 2021 unless he gets impeached. Sorry but you caused this catastrophe, and it’s going to take a decade or two to reverse a lot of the damage, and the ecological damage can’t be reversed at all.  It’s your fault that New York and Miami are going to be partially flooded 10 or 20 years sooner, not mine. It takes character to openly admit error, but you can still kiss my ass.

If anyone can send me a recent draft of Liz Hannah‘s script for The Post, the fast-track Steven Spielberg film about the Pentagon Papers crisis of 1971 that landed the Washington Post and the N.Y. Times in the crosshairs of the Nixon administration, please advise.

As recently reported by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming, The Post will begin shooting this May with 20th Century Fox intending to open it by December. Obviously a locked-in, ratified, slam-dunk Best Picture contender. So far it has Tom Hanks as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Post publisher Katherine Graham.

The big question is who’s going to play American patriot Daniel Ellsberg and N.Y. Times reporter Neil Sheehan, the guys who stood up and broke the Pentagon Papers story.

Just as United 93 focused on the entire air-traffic control confusion of 9/11 and not just the specific incidents aboard that fateful United Airlines flight, The Post will need to tell the whole Pentagon Papers story — most of it happening over a 17-day period in June 1971 — and not just the Washington Post‘s side of things,

First and foremost because Sheehan and the Times were the first to spill the beans, and in so doing proved that the Johnson administration lied over and over about the Vietnam War. The Post got in on the action five days after the Times began publishing Pentagon Papers excerpts on 6.13.71, and of course they and the Times got into a major Supreme Court battle with the Nixon administration over the right to publish such material.

On 6.30.71 the Supremes decided in favor of the Post and other newspapers who had published Pentagon Papers content, 6–3, stating that the Nixon gang had failed to meet the heavy burden of proof required for prior restraint injunction.

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A Criterion Bluray of Nicholas Ray‘s They Live By Night pops on 6.13. Based on Edward Anderson‘s Depression era novel “Thieves Like Us“, this 1948 classic launched the “kids on the run” sub-genre. Its influence was felt by Joseph H. Lewis‘s Gun Crazy (’50), Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty‘s Bonnie and Clyde (’67), Terrence Malick‘s Badlands (’73) and certainly in Robert Altman‘s Thieves Like Us (’74), which was also based on Anderson’s book. It was also Ray’s debut feature (shot in early ’47, released in August ’48). He soon gained respect as a strong, passionate helmer and his career chugged along for another 14 or 15 years, but drugs and alcohol gradually interfered more and more. Ray finally screwed the pooch when he collapsed on the set of 55 Days at Peking (’63).

Could a comedy-sketch show theoretically get away with doing a “Men on Books” routine in 2017? If a latter-day David Alan Grier and Damon Wayans, who ruled the nation when they did this on In Living Color between ’90 and ’93, were to try this on Saturday Night Live, they would be torn to shreds on Twitter. In a world in which Moonlight is the ultimate “oh, wow,” comedy routines like “Men on…” have to get the boot. The gap is too great; they can’t co-exist. All I know is that (a) I used to love In Living Color and (b) I sat in my seat like a stone-faced corpse as I watched Moonlight last September in Telluride.

I met Trae Crowder a while back when he visited Real Time with Bill Maher. He sounds like the grandson of the guy who fucked Ned Beatty in the ass in Deliverance, but he’s totally cool. If only there were a few more Southern guys like him — i.e., irreverent but amiable, nobody’s fool and willing to cut through the bullshit. Crowder’s co-authored book (with Corey Ryan Forrester), “The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin’ Dixie Outta the Dark“, came out last October, and I wouldn’t mind reading it.

Southerners are good people if you can forget what they believe in. I had a great time when I visited Shreveport six or seven years ago. I visited a nifty little country bar, drank a lot, joked around with everyone and met a pretty lady who had just left her husband and was looking to ratify this decision by doing the nasty with the right guy, who turned out to be me.

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What neighborhood? My guess is the Lower West Side, north of Canal. I’m sorry but Hollywood Elsewhere approves:

Hot on the heels of Jason Pollock‘s Stranger Fruit, a controversial doc about the 2014 Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson that premiered last weekend at South by Southwest, TheRoot.com‘s Michael Harriott has posted an even more inflammatory piece called “Everything You Think You Know About the Death of Mike Brown Is Wrong, and the Man Who Killed Him Admits It.”

The big assertion in Pollock’s doc is that a new security-cam video proves that Brown didn’t steal a box of cigarillos from a Ferguson liquor store before the 8.9.14 encounter with Ferguson policeman Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Brown following an altercation. Pollock’s conclusion is that minus the cigarillo element, Brown wasn’t a belligerent asshole thief but an amiable drug dealer who got caught in a racial crossfire.

But Harriott’s piece is a bigger bombshell, or at least it purports to be. It states that a court docket (i.e., an official summary of proceedings in a court of law) from a late-2014 civil suit proves that Wilson flat-out lied in his grand jury testimony about the incident.

Harriott excerpt: “New court papers reveal that Brown never tried to take the officer’s gun, never struck the officer and did not initiate any contact with Wilson, who was cleared of wrongdoing by a secret grand jury in November 2014.”

I spent 40 minutes this morning writing a response to Harriott’s article, and then sent it to a Brooklyn guy who had passed it along. I also copied it and sent a version to myself. There was no objectionable material in what I wrote, but both emails disappeared for some reason. On top of which the Brooklyn guy was unable to forward my original email back to my inbox. He finally captured the content in three PDF docs and sent them along…got it! Rather than re-type it, I’m posting the PDF images to save time:

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Last week an HE tipster caught a research screening of George Clooney‘s Suburbicon at the Sherman Oaks Arclight, and he says it’s quite good — a dry Fargo-esque noir comedy set in ’50s suburbia. The stars are Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac and young Noah Jupe.

He’s actually calling it Clooney’s best-directed film ever…more bell-ringy than The Ides of March, Monuments Men, Good Night and Good Luck, Leatherheads and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Paramount will presumably release Suburbicon sometime this fall.

Put another way, this guy has seen four unreleased films over the past few weeks (the other three were Trey Edward Shults‘ It Comes At Night, Jason Reitman‘s Tully and Destin Daniel Cretton‘s The Glass Castle), and he says Suburbicon is the best of the lot.

Suburbicon star Julianne Moore, director George Clooney during shooting last fall.

Suburbicon was shot in the Los Angeles area last October and November.

Joel and Ethan Coen‘s mid ’80s script was reworked by Clooney and Grant Heslov — they all share an even-steven “written by” credit (presumably pre-WGA review).

The other film Suburbicon resembles besides Fargo, he says, is Martin McDonagh‘s unreleased Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Fox Searchlight, sometime in the fall).

I’ll skip over the plot particulars, but it involves deceit, murder and hired hitmen a la Fargo with a pinch or two of Double Indemnity. Speaking of that 1944 Billy Wilder film, Oscar Isaac, portraying an insurance investigator, has a great interrogation scene towards the end in the tradition of Edward G. Robinson‘s Barton Keyes character.

Suburbicon‘s hired bad guys are vaguely similar to Fargo‘s Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare — i.e., a skinny guy and a bruiser type.

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