By: Dana Perelberg ’20

If you were to flip through a 2003 Staples High School yearbook, you’d find a picture of a girl by the name of Elizabeth Hannah. Although an average student back then, Hannah is far from average now. She is the Hollywood screenwriter for the highly-anticipated Steven Spielberg- directed movie, “The Post.”

Starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, the film is coming out on Jan. 12 and already has an Oscar campaign.

“I wrote the script on spec, which means I wasn’t paid for it and no one was committed to it,” Hannah said. “The intention was for me to get an agent and, through various industry machinations, the script was leaked to a few studios.

It quickly and luckily for me landed on the desk of Amy Pascal,” Hannah added. “She bought it within hours and we went on this crazy ride together for the last year.”

Amy Pascal’s connections brought Spielberg, Hanks and Streep together to make the picture.

“The Post” is centered around the Washington Post’s handling of the leaked Pentagon Papers in 1971. The movie centers around the decisions publisher Katharine Graham made when deciding whether the papers should be printed.

“I read [Graham’s] memoir, ‘Personal History,’ a few years ago and felt that she had a voice and a story that needed to be told,” Hannah said.

According to Hannah, Graham’s dialogue was one of the most difficult aspects of writing the script. In an interview with “Vulture,” Hannah said that she would sit and think about the dialogue for hours.

“It’s important, almost vital, to be flexible and to be constantly thinking on your toes,” Hannah said. “The only way to really prepare is to know the characters, the events, like you know your own life. So that if something rings untrue, or if there’s a new line to add in, you can come up with it on the spot.”

While her hard work seems to have paid off, Hannah said it was not always so obvious that her script would be successful.

“You’re not making any money to do it, and it could all be for nothing,” Hannah said. “So you just have to keep motivating yourself that it’s worth it – that something good will come out of it.”

Another challenge Hannah faced with the scripts was getting the correct facts. According to Hannah, there were two stages of collecting data.

First, Hannah had to do a lot of secondary research. “I didn’t have a lot of access to the real people,” Hannah said. “So I read everything I could, I watched everything I could, I tried to just digest as much information as possible.”

Once her script caught the eye of celebrities, interviewing primary sources became a lot easier. “After Steven [Spielberg] came on board,” Hannah said, “we were given an amazing amount of access. Not only to the Graham family who was incredibly helpful and accommodating, but also Ben Bradlee’s family, and the people at The Washington Post. We had technical consultants on set who had worked at The Post and with both Kay [Graham] and Ben [Bradlee], who were able to make sure we were getting their voices right.”

After facing the challenges of writing the script and making her mark in the movie industry, Hannah has a lot of advice to share for aspiring writers.

Besides reading everything and writing every day, Hannah says writers need to have faith in themselves.

“It mostly takes patience to not give up on yourself when everything you’ve written is awful,” Hannah said.“Just keep going… eventually it’ll all make sense.”