Aaron Sorkin has become much lauded for his politically savvy work on the likes of A Few Good Men, The West Wing and Studio 60, as well as writing the upcoming The Social Network and Moneyball. Now it looks like he’s about to continue the political trend by making his feature directing debut with a biopic of John Edwards.
This isn’t a look at the life of the TV psychic that South Park is so fond of calling a douche, it’s about the former Democratic presidential hopeful whose life has become mired in scandal. The film will be based on a book called The Politician: An Insider’s Account of John Edwards’s Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down, written by former Edwards aide called Andrew Young. Young became a notorious figure when, during John Edwards run for the 2008 Democratic presidential ticket, he claimed that counter to newspaper accounts that the senior politician had had an affair with a woman called Rielle Hunter (while his wife had breast cancer, no less) that produced a child, it was Young who was actually the father.
The aide later recanted the confession, and this year Edwards publicly admitted that the Hunter’s child is indeed his. Sorkin says about Young’s book, “This is a first-hand account of an extraordinary story filled with motivations, decisions and consequences that would have lit Shakespeare up. There’s much more to Andrew’s book than what has been reported, and I’m grateful that he’s trusting me with it.”
It could certainly make an interesting movie, as Sorkin is right, as just when Edwards looked set to become a frontrunner for the presideny, everything began to fall apart, with the politician making ever more desparate bids to hold up the house of cards he’d built – including claims he wanted to doctor DNA tests, before admitting the affair but denying the child, while his increasingly frustrated staff are said to have laid plans to deliberately derail his campaign if her ever got close to the presidential nomination. Sorkin will also write and produce the film, although no shoot date has been set yet.