Streep plays a publishing executive of a totally different stripe

IN THE Post, a new movie about The Washington Post’s behind-thescenes battle to publish the Pentagon Papers, feminism and the First Amendment take centre stage, according to an undated copy of the film’s script received by The Post.

Starring Oscar winners Tom Hanks as executive editor Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as the paper’s newly minted publisher Katharine Graham, the plot is like an awkward buddy dramedy, but before the two main characters actually become buddies. Bradlee is the brusque, Scotch-drinking newsman to Graham’s exceedingly proper but unsure chief executive.

At one point, Bradlee, frustrated that the New York Times scooped The Post and that Graham remains hesitant to publish the Pentagon Papers, asks his boss: “If you don’t believe you should be running it, why the hell should I?”

The draft of the script is unclear, but that appears to be the running theme throughout the film: Graham stepping into her own shoes as The Post’s decider-in-chief without the spectre of her predecessors in the job, who just so happen to be her late father, Eugene Meyer, and her late husband, Phil Graham.

Graham, the first female chief executive of a Fortune 500 company, is not so much an ice queen in the script as a reluctant monarch, a stark contrast to the last publishing executive Streep played to great acclaim: Miranda Priestly.

As with every coming-of-age drama, Graham eventually finds her footing, with several a-ha! moments in the script where she gets to espouse the virtues of both running a business and staying on mission. In the end shedecides the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. – The Washington Post