He's like, you know when you're at a store and you see a shirt and you're like,

it's just like 50 bucks more than I want to spend. And then you think about that shirt for the

next three months. That's basically how I pick projects.

I'm Sean Fennesy, Editor and Chief of the Ringer, and this is the big picture.

On this holiday edition of the show, I'm joined by the two screenwriters behind Steven Spielberg's

acclaimed new movie, The Post. Liz Hannah, little known and hoping to make name for herself in Hollywood,

wrote the original script less than two years ago and focused it on Catherine Graham at

a turning point in Graham's career. Set in 1971, an legendary and long-time publisher, The Washington

Post, is faced with the difficult decision of whether or not to publish the findings about the

Vietnam War and the Pentagon papers. In the movie, Graham and her editor Ben Bradley risked the

future of the paper and decades of relationships to publish the truth about decades of conspiracy

inside the government. Hannah script was eventually bought by the producer Amy Pascal,

who put it in the hands of Steven Spielberg, not bad for her first-time screenwriter.

Soon, Merrill Streep was on board as Graham, Tom Hanks joined her as Bradley, and the screenwriter

Josh Singer, fresh off his Oscar-winning work on 2015's Spotlight, came aboard to work on

the script on set with Hannah. I talked with Hannah and Singer about their collaboration,

how they made a story about documents into a compelling character study, and how their movie

parallels some of the more absurd occurrences in our modern-day administration. So without further

ado, here's Liz Hannah and Josh Singer.

Very excited to be joined by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, the screenwriters behind the post-guests.

Thanks for having us. This is a unique scenario. I've never had two screenwriters on the show

at the same time, and it's a unique scenario for how the movie came together. Liz, obviously,

...