It was, depending on your point of view, a marketing ploy, a counterinsurgency by serious cinema in the age of The Emoji Movie or Hollywood's real-life equivalent of the Avengers assembling, only with Steven Spielberg as Nick Fury. On 6 March, 45 days after Donald Trump's inauguration as the US's 45th president, it was announced that Spielberg would suspend post-production on his long-awaited sci-fi epic Ready Player One and instead direct a film about the Pentagon Papers.
The film, about the Washington Post's war with the White House over their 1971 publication of top-secret military documents, would see Tom Hanks (as Post editor Ben Bradlee) and Meryl Streep (as its publisher, Katharine Graham) tackle prominent issues, such as the role of a free press, the morality of leaks and the dividing line between national security and national interest. You imagine everyone involved would have had to resist mouthing to camera, "This is actually about now."
That Hollywood would react to the Trump era is no surprise. But that an industry that considers a decade or three in development to be a standard office workflow has managed to kick into gear, within weeks, is almost without precedent. The Post has snuck in just before the Oscar deadline and arrives on UK screens today (January 19th). What's more remarkable is that it's not alone. George Clooney's Suburbicon, for instance, which also uses a period piece to tell the tale of today, came out last November.
The film, says Clooney, was inspired by Trump's angry campaign speeches "about building fences and scapegoating minorities". The result is a resurrected and updated Coen brothers script from the Eighties based on the true story of William and Daisy Myers, a black family who were terrorised after moving to the suburban idyll of Levittown, Pennsylvania in 1957.
Trump was elected during shooting and crew members would say, "It's too bad it's not coming out today." But then, of course, came Charlottesville and the kind of relevance no one would wish for. "Unfortunately," Clooney said, "these issues never get old."
It begs the question, out of the worst of times, might we get the best of Hollywood? After all, 1976's All The President's Men was only made because of all the president's corruption.
More films are in the pipeline. There's Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House - about the Watergate source Deep Throat - while Rob Reiner's LBJ will star Woody Harrelson as the former vice president taking office after JFK's assassination.
But don't expect a film to tackle the Trump era head-on any time soon. After all, good cinema needs perspective. The first major films about 9/11 - World Trade Center and United 93 - didn't arrive until five years after the event.
Recently, I asked Alec Baldwin if he could see himself playing Trump in a dramatic film. He said no; he didn't feel Trump was worthy of that kind of attention. "The comedians," he told me, "will have it covered." He's probably right.
Expect, rather, a film that begins on an office door, with a nameplate that says Robert Mueller III. Expect it to be directed by Spielberg and Mueller to be played by Tom Hanks.
Timothee Chalamet has just helped end Woody Allen's career
Watch Liam Neeson rank his on-screen characters' very particular set of skills
