It’s easy to look at those involved with big important films and assume they started out at some sort of high point. It’s not every day that you get to work on a film with the living legend Steven Spielberg, let alone if you’re someone who hasn’t really been involved in a standard feature.

Such was the case for one of the co-writers of the upcoming investigative journalism flick The Post. The writer in question is the relatively new-to-the-business Liz Hannah. Sure, she had some work on a few shorts, a documentary, and a one-off writing gig for an Awesomeness TV series episode. However, according to the writer, she didn’t have so much as an agent when she first wrote the flick, as she revealed to our very own Gig Patta in a phone interview.

This led to the first draft of the script getting written without any input from the Washington Post itself. That obviously changed when Spielberg came on board.

“When I wrote it, I didn’t have an agent, so I didn’t have access to any of them. Fortunately, when you write a movie about journalists, most of the time they also have written a book about it. There’s an enormous amount of books out there in the world about the papers themselves. Obviously, Kay’s memoir has an amazing part about this chapter in history. There was a lot of information out there in the world to consume.

When Steven came on, the most amazing thing about Steven Spielberg directing your film, is that everyone wants to help. We had an amazing access to the Graham family and to the Washington Post itself.

We were able to speak to everyone who was available to us. It was amazing on how it gives you a level of authenticity that you can’t get in any other way.”

Indeed authenticity is quite important, and it seems pretty lucky that they were able to have such resources available to them when they did. That being said, this can also be seen as a great story of an amazing script getting the attention it deserves.

Of course, it also highlights the mantra of the biz, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” can certainly be attributed to this, as once Spielberg was involved, things really started to take off.

The Post hits theaters today!

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