News > Spielberg Looks to Lincoln

Steven Spielberg's long-gestating Abraham Lincoln period piece is finally getting the go ahead. According to Variety, the director told the German magazine "FOCUS" that he was planning to begin shooting the untitled Civil War era drama as soon as early next year, after he directs his portion of the "Tintin" trilogy this fall.

The script by Tony Kushner (playwright of "Angels in America") is reportedly quite solid and practically ready to go. Kushner and Spielberg used Doris Kearns Goodwin's "The Uniter: The Genius of Abraham Lincoln" as a touchstone for the formation of the screenplay. This film is bumping the Aaron Sorkin-written "The Trial of the Chicago Seven" to a later date. That film is likely to star Sacha Baron Cohen as 1960s rabble-rouser Abbie Hoffman, but the script needs rewrites before it can go forward.

Liam Neeson has been on board to play Lincoln seemingly from day one. My hope is that this in conjunction with Martin Scorsese's "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" will launch some sort of future Mt. Rushmore box set (with Woody Allen making George Washington deliver awkward puns about King George and David Cronenberg doing a terrifyingly sexual Jefferson biopic).

-David Morgan