'The Post' Release Date, Cast News: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep Join Cast; Steven Spielberg Directs Pentagon Papers Film
Fox and Amblin Entertainment are cooking up a star-studded film about the Pentagon Papers that will be titled "The Post." Recently, reports have it that Academy Award winners Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep will star in the film that will be directed by Steven Spielberg.
This would be the first time for Streep and Spielberg to work together in a film, while the director has helmed several movies that starred Hanks, including the classic war-themed flick "Saving Private Ryan."
According to Deadline, Hanks will play the role of Ben Bradlee while Streep will portray Kay Graham. They are the editor and publisher, respectively, of The Washington Post in 1971 who decisively challenged the government's attempt to stop their newspaper from publishing the leaked Pentagon Papers provided by whistleblower and military expert Daniel Ellsberg.
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The Pentagon Papers refer to the result of a top secret research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense tackling the country's involvement, both on the political and military aspects, in the Vietnam War. The study was created in 1967 upon the request of then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
It was revealed that the U.S. deployed up to more than 500,000 American soldiers in South Vietnam to directly take part in the Vietnam War – a piece of information that was deliberately hidden from the public eye and something that the U.S. government tried to repeatedly deny.
However, Ellsberg, one of the military experts who took part in the research, saw the horrors of the Vietnam War and thought that the American people deserved to know about it. So in 1971, he secretly reproduced a copy of the Pentagon Papers and submitted it to the New York Times to be published. The Times then released a series of articles about the papers but was stopped by the federal court after three articles.
Meanwhile, months after the censorship imposed on the Times, Ellsberg went to Bradlee and Graham hoping that they could publish the Pentagon Papers. Despite pressure from the state, the Post created their own series of articles revolving around the classified document as they joined the Times in the fight to uphold freedom of the press.
Other information such as the movie's target release date have yet to be announced.
