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BY LAURA BERGER AND MELISSA SILVERSTEIN Liz Hannah took Hollywood by Stormwith “The Post,” and She’s Just Getting Started

Liz Hannah has been tweeting a lot about dreams coming true – she’s living proof. The screenwriter recently celebrated her 32nd birthday at the Washington D.C. premiere of her first film, “The Post.” The story of how quickly her film got made is virtually unheard of. She spent three months working on the

script for the Pentagon Papers drama and finished its first draft in June 2016. The screenplay placed second on The Black List, a high-profile industry list of the most popular unproduced scripts in Hollywood. It was purchased by Amy Pascal’s production company on Halloween, and it was in Steven Spielberg’s hands by February 2017. After he signed on

to direct,Meryl Streep andTomHankswere cast to star, and the pic started shooting in May. The feature hit theaters to rave reviews in December and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture shortly thereafter. Less than two years ago Hannah was an unproduced writer, and she’s now an Oscar nominee, thanks to her co-producing credit on the film. To call her rise meteoric seems like an understatement – especiallywhen you consider the fact that Hannah initially didn’t have the confidence to try her hand at writing professionally. “I always wanted to be involved in making movies, and I knew I wanted to do that creatively. I, frankly, didn’t have the confidence to start off doing that through writing,” Hannah says. “My admiration for writers was – and is – so great that I didn’t want to try and fail. But after working in development for a few years, the nagging dream to be a writer never went away. I was young and naive enough to take the jump and leave my job to pursue writing full time.” She was working at Oscar- winner Charlize Theron’s production company at the time, and the Oscar winner was a mentor to Hannah. When she showed Theron and producer Beth Kono a script she penned, they encouraged her to quit her job and pursue writing full-time. Hannah worked on pilots and spec scripts that didn’t go anywhere, then decided she’d give writing one final shot before pursuing a more practical job. Her last-ditch effort was her ultimate passion project, a story that had fascinated her since she read Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham’s autobiography, “Personal History.”

MERYL STREEP– THE POST PHOTO BY NIKO TAVERNISE © 2017 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION AND STORYTELLER DISTRIBUTION CO. LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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