Will ‘Rodham’ Affect Hillary Clinton In 2016?
Hillary Clinton’s next run for the White House could be battling Hollywood as well as the Republicans in 2016. A feature film from the producers of The Twilight Saga about the former Secretary of State’s early life looks set to come out just as the primaries begin heating up in the next election. And even though Rodham, from writer Young II Kim’s 2012 winning Black List script, is about the Clintons’ early years, it certainly will remind people of the couple’s history – especially their public soap opera during the 1990s. Marty Bowen’s and Wyck Godfrey’s Temple Hill Entertainment and managers The Arlook Group have just attached Spectacular Now director James Ponsoldt to helm. Both the writer and the director are repped by UTA. The producers are looking to get Hillary cast before they start shopping the film to financiers and studios. The movie focuses on the early 1970s and Hillary’s personal battle between her own political ambitions and her desire to marry her equally ambitious Yale Law boyfriend Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, Hollywood support for both Clintons is approaching 1990s levels. I’ve learned big Democratic donors Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Katzenberg are preparing to get behind Hillary as bundlers for 2016. But Hillary’s last run in 2008 with its sense of entitlement and inevitability turned off former supporters like David Geffen. Right now Hillary isn’t discussing future political plans, only a new memoir about her State Department experiences coming out next year for Simon & Schuster which reportedly paid $8M-plus. Meanwhile Hollywood political films are doing well on television, like HBO’s Emmy-winning portrayal of Sarah Palin’s VP run Game Change. Late last year, the pay channel optioned the book about the 2012 race that Game Change authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann are currently writing. HBO also has a documentary about Bill Clinton coming from Martin Scorsese, who was a supporter of Hillary’s Senate campaigns. Meanwhile, let’s not forget that conservative author Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016 Obama’s America became the second-highest-grossing political documentary feature film of all time. (A follow-up is in the works.)
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