Last weekend the buzz was that Paul Greengrass would be taking over The Trial of the Chicago 7 from Steven Spielberg; if you had to name a director perfectly suited to this material, it would be Paul. I got pretty excited, but reliable sources told me to not count my chickens, that Paul had already passed on the project. I shot off an email to Paul, who is deep in editing of Green Zone, his Iraq War movie starring Matt Damon.
Turns out that it’s too good to be true. While Paul thinks it’s a ‘wonderful project,’ and he had been talking about doing it, the timing didn’t work out. So Paul Greengrass will not be staging the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots, which is kind of a bummer.
This does mean that the project is not dead, though – that it’s been going out to other directors. It’s hard to imagine anyone as obvious as Greengrass to helm, but then again that’s why I’m sitting in a Studio City apartment writing about this stuff and not on the Universal lot next door, making the big decisions and the big bucks.