JFK Limited Series Being Developed By KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Co-Writer Eric Roth
Netflix is producing a limited series based on the life of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, and that project is being developed by Killers of the Flower Moon co-writer Eric Roth.
The series will be based on the book “JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956” written by Fredrik Logevall. That book is the first part of a planned two-volume biography of Kennedy. The first part focuses on Kennedy’s life from his birth up to his time when he was the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts.
The report goes on to say that Netflix sees “the series as something like an American version of The Crown, given the highly influential history of the Kennedy family in America.”
Kennedy certainly did live a crazy and interesting life. I’ve read a few books on his life and unless you’ve delved into his background, you have no idea how insane his life was and the wild stuff that went on behind the the scenes. I doubt that this series would get into this kind of stuff, but I hope they do! All the really interesting things are what most people don’t know about.
Roth is attached to write and executive produce the project. Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping of Chernin Entertainment will also executive produce. They are currently looking for a showrunner.
Here’s the description of the book:
By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen, a booming American nation that he had steered through some of the most perilous diplomatic standoffs of the Cold War. Born in 1917 to a striving Irish American family that had become among Boston’s wealthiest, Kennedy knew political ambition from an early age, and his meteoric rise to become the youngest elected president cemented his status as one of the most mythologized figures in American history. And while hagiographic portrayals of his dazzling charisma, reports of his extramarital affairs, and disagreements over his political legacy have come and gone in the decades since his untimely death, these accounts all fail to capture the full person.
Beckoned by this gap in our historical knowledge, Fredrik Logevall has spent much of the last decade searching for the “real” JFK. The result of this prodigious effort is a sweeping two-volume biography that properly contextualizes Kennedy amidst the roiling American Century. This volume spans the first thirty-nine years of JFK’s life—from birth through his decision to run for president—to reveal his early relationships, his formative experiences during World War II, his ideas, his writings, his political aspirations. In examining these pre–White House years, Logevall shows us a more serious, independently minded Kennedy than we’ve previously known, whose distinct international sensibility would prepare him to enter national politics at a critical moment in modern U.S. history.
Along the way, Logevall tells the parallel story of America’s midcentury rise. As Kennedy comes of age, we see the charged debate between isolationists and interventionists in the years before Pearl Harbor; the tumult of the Second World War, through which the United States emerged as a global colossus; the outbreak and spread of the Cold War; the domestic politics of anti-Communism and the attendant scourge of McCarthyism; the growth of television’s influence on politics; and more.
Source: Variety