Just 18 months ago, then 31-year-old Liz Hannah thought her career wasn’t going anywhere…then, despite ‘one in a million’ odds, she got her first movie made by Steven Spielberg. After a decade of hustling, first in development at Charlize Theron’s female-centric production company and then as an aspiring screenwriter, Hannah was beginning to think, “Maybe this isn’t what I’m supposed to do.”
Her boyfriend, TV writer Brian Millikin, suggested she spend the summer writing about the woman who had fixated her for years: Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham, who braved the Nixon administration’s legal threats and her own insecurities to print the Pentagon Papers.
Graham had taken over the family business unexpectedly after her husband’s suicide eight years earlier, and she defied advisers who said that printing the secret study about the Vietnam War could lead to the company’s demise. “That’s the moment where she came of age,” Hannah says. “You want to find the most interesting and relatable window into a person’s life.”
Graham’s autobiography, “Personal History,” won her a Pulitzer. Hollywood, however, left her heroism on the cutting room floor. Read the article at The Lily.
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