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Nice in-depth article by the Hollywood Reporter. Also, check the following update for their cover story: In late February, Steven Spielberg hit a wall. Six years after he had started work on period piece The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara — and just weeks before he was due to start filming in Italy — he couldn’t find a boy to play the lead. In need of distraction, he picked up a spec screenplay that his CAA agents had sent him, and fell in love. The Papers, as the script was then called, didn’t just tell the story of The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham, both of whom he knew; it also touched on one of the most relevant issues of the day: freedom of the press, and Graham’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, at the risk of losing her family-owned newspaper. After mulling things over, Spielberg told his longtime production partner, Kristie Macosko Krieger, that he was going to shut down Mortara and immediately jump onto the other film, which he wanted in theaters by the end of the year. “Everybody thought that I was off my rocker,” he admits. “But the great thing about having these decades-long collaborations is that the whole scrimmage swung to the left and we seriously started to prioritize the bare necessities.” “He said, ‘Can we make this movie this year? Can it come out this year?'” recalls Macosko Krieger. “So I [went] to my editorial staff, my postproduction crew, and said, ‘I know we can shoot it, but can we post it in time?’ Because we were also in postproduction on Ready Player One, the gigantic movie at Warner Bros. We sat down and did a giant war room, and we felt pretty confident that we could make it work. But we knew it would be tight.” The complete article can be read over at the Hollywood Reporter.
