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Aaron Sorkin's Directing Debut is a Biopic About John Edwards
by Ethan Anderton
July 16, 2010
Source: Deadline
After writing many masterful screenplays with fully memorable and quotable lines of dialogue, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is now poised to make his directorial debut. Deadline reports Sorkin has optioned rights to The Politician: An Insider's Account of John Edwards's Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down, a non-fiction book written by the former presidential candidate's one-time aide. Sorkin will be directing from a script which he will be writing himself. Though no studio is attached yet, with all the buzz his scripts for The Social Network and Moneyball gathered, you know someone will bite on this soon.
The story of his fall from the climb for the US Presidency swept headlines across the nation as a promising Democratic frontrunner found himself amidst a huge scandal after a tabloid revealed the married senator had fathered an illegitimate child with another woman. Despite lots of denial, Edwards eventually admitted to the affair which birthed a child and his career went all Humpty Dumpty. Sorkin will pick up the pieces and I'm sure he'll put together another stellar drama which he calls, "an extraordinary story filled with motivations, decisions and consequences that would have lit Shakespeare up." That's some hyperbole, but I wouldn't expect anything less.
However, we know the man is talented on the page, but can he bring those pages to life through the camera? We'll have to wait and see, but I'm hoping for the best. In addition to his stellar work on those forthcoming films (Sorkin's dialogue drives the first two trailers for The Social Network, which are almost entirely audio only), Sorkin has also scripted two of my favorite dramas (Charlie Wilson's War and A Few Good Men) and two of my favorite TV series ("The West Wing" and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip"). I'll be looking forward to anything with Sorkin's involvement, and we'll keep you posted as this political project project develops.
2 Comments
1
why? what has Edwards done that requires a biopic about his life? He's not dead...I mean this just seems kinda...kinda useless...not because I disagree with his politics (I have no idea what he stands for, unless infidelity! Zing! See what I did there, right? right?) but because who would want to see it?
Xerxex on Jul 16, 2010
2
At first I was skeptical, but I found "The Politician" to be a great book. The mind behind the "The West Wing" should be able to make a great film out of that.
Kevin Raffay on Jul 17, 2010
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