Since the great Steven Spielberg keeps stalling on that LINCOLN project that was supposed to star Liam Neeson, somebody’s got to do something during this long boring wait. And that somebody is none other than the equally great legendary filmmaker Robert Redford. The man who gave birth to Sundance Film Festival and is known to be very vocal when it comes to politics, is going to take on THE CONSPIRATOR.
Yeah, sounds like a straight to DVD Jean Claude Van Damme B-Movie, but thank God that’s not the case. According to Riskybizblog, THE CONSPIRATOR is about the infamous Mary Surratt, the woman President Andrew Johnson called as second only to John Wilkes Booth in the assassination plot of the 16th President of United States.
She sympathized with the Confederates and supplied Wilkes Booth and his accomplice weapons at her tavern after the murder took place at the Ford’s theater. Surratt’s son John was also alleged to be part of the conspiracy, was also put on trial but was never convicted.
Mary Surrat, however, was found guilty. She went down in history as the first woman ever executed by the United States federal government, and was hanged by the neck til dead in 1865.
But that’s not all that THE CONSPIRATOR will focus on, the movie is also meant to be a drama/thriller, because of the volatile days following the assassination, people feared that another civil war would happen again.
Probably like the movie Thirteen Days when tension was felt in the White House as they faced Cuban Missile Crisis and what they feared to be a possible start of a nuclear war.
Producers Greg Shapiro, Rob and Web Stone and Brian Peter Falk want James McAvoy to play one of the lead roles in THE CONSPIRATOR which will start production this fall.
