Steven Spielberg is set to direct Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in a new film called The Post. The dream team was announced yesterday via trade blog Deadline.
The Post is a drama about the Washington Post’s role in exposing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, and how the Post’s editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Kay Graham challenged the federal government over their right to publish them.
The Pentagon Papers was the name given to a secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, prepared at the request of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967.
Jason Robards won a 1974 Best Supporting Actor Oscar portraying a Watergate-era Bradlee in All the President’s Men. In this film Hanks is set to play Bradlee, while Streep would play Graham.
This will be the fifth time that Hanks has worked with Spielberg, following the films Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal and Bridge of Spies.
Streep has worked on a Spielberg film before; she voiced the blue fairy for Spielberg in A.I., and she is narrating the Netflix documentary Five Came Back, in which Spielberg appears and executive produces.
