Worried that Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator” — an Abraham Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth film starring James McAvoy and Robin Wright Penn — has killed Steven Spielberg’s long-gestating “Lincoln” project being written by Tony Kushner and hopefully starring Liam Neeson in the lead role?
Never fear. Variety has an entire story about the fact that Spielberg remains undeterred and will continue to pursue the project regardless. “We are very happy that Redford will be doing this Lincoln movie. It is completely different from what our DreamWorks Lincoln movie will be, and we believe that it will add to the commercial potential of our film. Lincoln as a subject is inexhaustible,” Spielberg himself told Peter Bart.
Evidently, Kusher is revising the script — once thought abandoned at Paramount and now at Dreamworks – and the story will focus on the president’s anguish over the length and toll of the Civil War (or at least that’s what it was focused on before. Sounds like this could change).
So “Lincoln” is still somewhere on the docket, though “Harvey,” the tale of the lovable looney who has a imaginary talking rabbit as a friend, is evidently next. Worried that Spielberg will tackle a bunch of mainstream crap for Dreamworks in the interim like a Pirates movie and other populist nonsense like that? We can’t reassure you there. Now that his company is at Disney, and Dreamworks recently received a $325 million dollar loan, he might want to use that money towards solid-gold box-office projects before he tries to get adventurous. It might be a while before “Lincoln” rears its head, but fans of “serious” Spielberg (us) as opposed to “fluff” Spielberg obviously can’t wait.