Go Into The Story Interview (Part 3): Liz Hannah

My hour-long conversation with ‘The Post’ screenwriter Liz Hannah.

Sometimes the story behind the story is as compelling as the story itself and that’s the case with Liz Hannah, writer of the 2015 Black List script The Post which went on to be directed by Steven Spielberg, and star Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks.

The Post goes into wide release this week, expanding into theaters across North America on January 12th. After reading this week-long interview series, I am sure you will want to see the movie. The story is both compelling in its historical context and relevant to the world we find ourselves in today. Plus, in our conversation, Liz provides deep insights into the inner workings of the script’s conception and creation.

In Part 3 of our six-part series, Liz and I dig into the story’s two central characters: Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) and Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), and the historical significance of the Pentagon Papers as well as their narrative importance in The Post.

Scott: When you started writing the script in June, you had zeroed in on the Pentagon Papers.

Liz: Yes. I think a lot of writers talk about this. This isn’t striking gold or anything, but I think most of writing is actually done when you’re not sitting in front of a computer. As much as it took me only three months to write the first draft of this script, it took me three years to figure out what the story was, who she was, what I wanted to say about her, and what resonated with me.

It was a lot of reading, and thinking, and doing that but, by the time I finally sat down at my computer last spring or last summer, I knew this was the window in time. I knew the three acts of this film.

Scott: With Katharine Graham, a female in a male-dominated environment journalism was she one of the few or only…

Liz: She was the only female publisher at the time and she was the first female “Fortune 500” CEO.

Scott: She had the shadow of her father and her deceased husband looming over her.

Liz: Correct.

Scott: And a decided underdog. There’s a side of dialogue in the script where a character says, “It says that if you want a good party, you call Kay Graham. Run a paper? There’s a whole list of names that come first.” That underdog component, how important was that to you when you were writing it?

Liz: Extremely. I think I naturally gravitate towards underdogs. I wasn’t the most popular kid in high school. I was always reading. I wasn’t unpopular, but I was just always trying to figure out how to fit in, as I think all of us are. I just naturally have always gravitated towards them. I think, also, being a woman, you also naturally gravitate toward the underdog.

Kay, the thing about her that I always found really fascinating and one of the first things that I really connected to about her was she never victimized herself, but she was extremely vulnerable. She was extremely, in her memoir, willing to mention her mistakes, and go into great detail about what her mistakes were, and analyze them.

Not even mistakes, necessarily, but choices she made and choices she regreted, and very willing, particularly about the chapter in her book that takes place about this time, very willing to talk about how vulnerable she felt and how insecure she was feeling about being in the position she was in.

I think without ever, obviously, calling herself an underdog she would never, ever think of herself that way. That was a very interesting perspective to me.

She just saw herself as maintaining until her son could come and take over the company. I think that was a really just unique self-reflection on her part that I thought was not something that had been explored a lot.

Scott: In contrast to her personality and her perspective, that’s interesting you used the word “vulnerable”, because that’s not the word that comes to mind when you think of Ben Bradlee.

Liz: I don’t think so. [laughs]

Scott: You describe him as the start of the story with a side of dialogue where he says, “Because I used to be good at getting a story, fighting for it.” At the center of the plot, these two characters, that relationship. What drew you to these two personalities?

Liz: I think, for me, there was a big…I was always in love with Kay and her story. Then there’s also this idea that this was the forming of the superhero team. We know from history that these two people came together and were able (with Woodward, Bernstein, and the rest of The Post team) to take down a President a few years after the film takes place.

That forming of that team, we always like in movies when we see the training montage. We always love how the team comes together. There’s something that’s inherently, for me, attractive about those stories. At this point in their relationship, they had known each other for a long time.

She had hired him to work at the company very quickly after her husband had passed away, but they weren’t totally there yet. They weren’t firing on all cylinders. There was something very interesting about telling this male/female relationship that wasn’t about romance and it wasn’t a meet-cute. It was a forming of this superhero team. That was something that was really attractive to me.

I just also think Ben is… I think he’s such a man of a different era and he’s such an icon. Actually, a friend of mine just sent me an article about Ben Bradlee because this film just came out about him on HBO and, obviously, with our movie. He had a swagger about him that was sort of iconic. I didn’t grow up in that era and I still knew what that was. I still knew who he was.

There was something very exciting about being able to write this guy who, not only did he have a swagger, but he also didn’t care that she was a woman. That was always something that was fascinating to me and very different about Ben, is that he didn’t care that his boss was a woman.

He just wanted her to do her job, and that’s not necessarily the typical perspective you get of men in 1971, let alone men in 2017. I think that that was something that was really…Ben was just really fun to write. He’s kind of persnickety, and kind of has a temper, and definitely thinks he is as good as he is. It was just fun. He was a fun character to write.

Scott: Super motivated around the Pentagon Papers, because The New York Times had beaten the Post by three months, they’d had the Papers that long.

Liz: Correct.

Scott: For people who wouldn’t know, could you explain why the Pentagon Papers were so important?

Liz: On a very Wikipedia level, the Pentagon Papers were thousands of pages of documents that were put together via Robert McNamara at the Pentagon. He had assembled this team of academics and former DoD employees and government employees, one of whom was Daniel Ellsberg. This was when LBJ was in office.

He wanted to collect everything in the government that had been discussed about Vietnam, and put it together in one place so that they could figure out what went wrong. He, at this point, had spent many years publicly defending the war and privately trying to negotiate the avenues of getting out through two presidencies. He was there through Kennedy and for LBJ.

The documents themselves are…everything that was ever touched in the government about Vietnam from Truman to LBJ. Four presidents.

The reason they were important is that they showed that four presidents had lied. That four White Houses had knowingly lied to the American people when they were going out into public and saying that the United States is winning in Vietnam, that this is an important war, that we need to defend these people.

That was all a lie that they knew at that time that thousands of American soldiers were going to die, they were continuing the draft knowing that they were sending them into a losing battle, and these documents were, these papers were the culmination of all of that knowledge put in one place.

Scott: I was going to say, then they become this enormous narrative element and the key point of the story really is a choice about whether The Washington Post should publish them or not. Katharine Graham and Bradlee have different perspectives on this.

Liz: Yeah. The New York Times had the papers. They’d gotten them from, now we know, Daniel Ellsberg. They had three months where they’d vetted them and decided what the stories would be, so they really had a leg up.

At this time in history, The Washington Post wasn’t just a local paper. It was the second most popular local paper in Washington. It wasn’t even that it was The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Washington Post was never even in the same sentence as The New York Times.

Ben Bradlee, that irked him, to say the least. They ran in all the same circles as Abe Rosenthal and Scotty Reston, who were with The New York Times. Abe Rosenthal had no problem telling them that The Times was better. There was a lot of competitiveness between them.

On one hand, for Ben, there was a real competitiveness, a real journalistic one-upsmanship once he knew that The New York Times couldn’t publish anymore, that they had to, that that was the only way that they were going to really be in the same conversation.

For Kay, it was very much the company had just gone public. They were not cash-solvent, so they really needed the IPO, and there is a clause that a week after the IPO goes out, it can be cancelled due to a catastrophic event.

One of the catastrophic events is a federal indictment, which The Washington Post could very easily have been federally indicted because of publishing these papers.

There were these two sides of, on one hand, Ben knew that the only way The Post could stay in…It said multiple times in the movie and was said multiple times in history, which was, “The only way to assert the right to publish is to publish.” He very much knew that.

For Kay, she also was grappling with this could take down the company and the legacy of the paper and her family her father, her husband, and the legacy she was trying to leave for her children. There was that.

At the same time, Ben and Kay were both extremely close to two of the fundamental people mentioned three of them, actually mentioned in these papers: Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Kay’s husband had put LBJ on the ticket with Kennedy.

Ben was there to meet Jackie after Kennedy had been shot, had been assassinated. Robert McNamara had picked every single person on The Washington Post board for Katharine Graham. There was a very, very intimate tie to a number of people involved in these papers.

There was, on a whole other level, this feeling of betrayal, this feeling of did we protect our friends? I think that was something that really happened after the publishing of these papers. Was the real division between the government and the press.

At that time a lot of things were done in the back rooms, and at dinner tables, and that’s where a lot of things were negotiated. Now it was very on the record, off the record.

Here are some interview bits with Liz as part of the promotion of the movie The Post:

Tomorrow in Part 4, Liz delves into her approach to writing dialogue in a script which is dialogue-heavy, and answers the question: Did you ever put on your producer’s hat and think, ‘There’s no way anyone will make this movie.’

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Movie Website

Twitter: @itslizhannah, @ThePostMovie.

The movie opens in theaters across North America beginning January 12th.