Halfway into Donald Trump’s first 100 days as President of the United States, and HBO Films has already commissioned a cinematic treatment of the long and frequently absurd election that put him in office. (THR / Live Feed)
The TV project is based on the yet-to-be-released third Game Change novel by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, co-authors of the book series that influenced HBO’s 2012 film Game Change. The producers behind Game Change are on board for the upcoming miniseries. (Variety)
Halperin and Heilemann were co-authors of 2008 and 2012 election chronicles Game Change and Double Down. There was no HBO series based on Double Down, which covered the comparatively less cinematic Obama re-election contest against Mitt Romney. Penguin is slated to publish the as-yet-untitled book on the 2016 election in early 2018. (HuffPost)
Halperin and Heilemann, who are also producers and hosts of The Circus, a weekly documentary series on Showtime, will be entering crowded terrain in revisiting last year’s campaign. In the months since the election, several prominent political reporters have sold memoirs and books promising an inside view of the race, including Katy Tur of NBC News, who is writing a book about covering the Trump campaign, and Amy Chozick of The New York Times, who is working on a memoir of her years covering Hillary Clinton. (NYT)
During the campaign, Halperin and Heilemann were co-hosts of All Due Respect, a political affairs show for Bloomberg Politics. They left Bloomberg Politics after the election in a reorganization that saw the cancellation of the show. (Poynter)