Lionsgate In Early Talks To Back Hillary Clinton Film ‘Rodham’
EXCLUSIVE: After setting a Thanksgiving Weekend record with Jennifer Lawrence’s female protagonist Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Lionsgate is eyeing another film with a strong female heroine. The mini-major is in early talks to back Rodham, a feature about the formative years of former First Lady and Secretary State and potential presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. No actress has yet been set to play Clinton, but several prominent ones are circling, I’m told.
This is the project that James Ponsoldt wants to make his directorial follow-up to The Spectacular Now, based on the Black List script by Young Il Kim. Produced by Temple Hill partners Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey, Rodham covers Hillary when she was a hotshot young lawyer in D.C. and was torn between flourishing in Capitol Hill or going back to Arkansas to rekindle a relationship with her ex-boyfriend, a law teacher named Bill Clinton, who didn’t want to leave home.
Related: Will ‘Rodham’ Affect Hillary Clinton In 2016?
Lionsgate seems a better outlet for a formative years film on the former Hillary Rodham than either NBC, which planned a miniseries based on her life, or CNN, which planned a documentary. Both projects were scrapped after the Republican National Committed voted to bar both networks from their 2016 presidential debates because of perceived bias.
Ponsoldt is repped by UTA and Brillstein.
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