Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment Developing Walter Cronkite Vietnam Film
Steven Spielberg and his Amblin Entertainment are producing a new film project that centers on news reporter Walter Cronkite and the Vietnam War. According to Deadline, Spielberg'sBridge of Spies screenwriter Matt Charman pitched the film and is also writing the script.
According to the report, the story focuses on "Cronkite’s relationship with the Vietnam War and the role that America’s most trusted newsman played in turning public opinion against the increasingly un-winnable conflict. So influential was the CBS Evening News anchor that then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson is believed to have remarked, 'If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.'"
Spielberg is only attached as a producer on the project. He's currently prepping to shoot Ready Player One, and after that he's looking to direct a film called The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara with his Bridge of Spies and The BFG star Mark Rylance. That movie tells the story of a young Jewish boy in Bologna, Italy in 1858 who, "having been secretly baptized, is forcibly taken from his family to be raised as a Christian. His parents’ struggle to free their son becomes part of a larger political battle that pits the Papacy against forces of democracy and Italian unification."
If Spielberg can make room in his schedule after the script is written, there's a chance that he could end up directing the Walter Cronkite film. I know a few bits and pieces about Cronkite and the Vietnam War, but in case you're wondering a little more about the role the reporter played during the war, the report offers the following:
1968 was a year of great upheaval in the U.S., with the assassinations of Dr Martin Luther King and Senator Robert F. Kennedy; the violence witnessed at the Democratic convention in Chicago and, of course, the ongoing war in Vietnam. Cronkite had already journeyed to Vietnam once before in 1965 in a carefully stage-managed visit designed to prove to him and other attending media that progress was being made. In 1968, however, Cronkite returned to South East Asia to see the war for himself and the consequences of the Tet Offensive. What he found convinced him, in his own words during his special report, to say, “It seems now, more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” That devastating sentence shifted the tide of public opinion against the war and only weeks later LBJ announced he would not be running for re-election in that year’s Presidential race.
That moment also revolutionised network news in America. It was arguably the first-ever editorialised, opinionated report on U.S. televised news, heralding the age- years later- of the 24-hour-news cycle and mass media machine around us today.
This is one of those film projects that has Oscar nominations written all over it, so it might be in Spielberg's best interest to direct it if he's able to.