For decades, Hollywood filmmakers have facilitated screenings of their movies at the White House, and that tradition is apparently continuing with the current administration under President Donald Trump.
As The Hollywood Reporter reports, Trump’s team have requested a White House screening of “The Post”, the Steven Spielberg-directed historical drama surrounding the Washington Post‘s legal battle with the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, which ultimately led to Nixon resigning in disgrace in order to avoid impeachment.
Spielberg reportedly rushed production of the film — starring Tom Hanks as Post executive editor Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as the newspaper’s owner, Katharine Graham — in order to get the film in theatres as quickly as possible during the current political climate in which the press is increasingly under attack by the president, who continually slams the Post and other media outlets as “fake news.”
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The irony is impossible to ignore, as former FBI director Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s suspected collusion with the Russian government to tamper with the 2016 presidential election continues to wind its way closer to Trump, mirroring the Watergate investigation that eventually ensnared Nixon.
While a film’s stars and director would typically attend White House screenings in the past, don’t expect that to happen when “The Post” screens at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., given Streep’s scathing anti-Trump comments at 2017’s Golden Globe Awards and Trump’s blistering response on Twitter, declaring Streep to be “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood.”
Meanwhile, Hanks has already declared that he would decline an invitation to the Trump White House. “I don’t think I would,” Hanks said when asked if he would attend a White House screening of the film.
“I would not have been able to imagine that we would be living in a country where neo-Nazis are doing torchlight parades in Charlottesville [Va.] and jokes about Pocahontas are being made in front of the Navajo code talkers,” the two-time Oscar winner told THR in an earlier interview.
“And individually we have to decide when we take to the ramparts. You don’t take to the ramparts necessarily right away, but you do have to start weighing things,” he added. “You may think, You know what? I think now is the time.”