Rathergate comes back to the public consciousness next month with Truth. The Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett-starring film tells the tale of how beloved TV anchor Dan Rather fell from grace.
The story takes viewers behind the scenes of the 2004 controversy in which Rather and his team wrongly reported that then-president George W. Bush went AWOL during his Vietnam-era service. In the trailer, we see Redford play a stately Dan Rather as he reports the scoop — and then suffers the consequences.
Truth is based on the novel Truth and Duty from the CBS news producer at the time, Mary Mapes. The trailer shows Cate Blanchett, who plays Mapes in the film, in full form: both stridently working on putting the big news report together, and playing the front line when their scoop is found to be false. “Our story was about whether the president fulfilled his service,” Blanchett’s Mapes says. “Nobody wants to talk about that. They want to talk about fonts and forgeries. And they hope to god the truth gets lost in the scrum.”
The film is the directorial debut for James Vanderbilt (writer, The Amazing Spiderman), who also wrote the script. The Sony Classics drama also stars Topher Grace, Elizabeth Moss, and Dennis Quaid.
According to The Hollywood Report, Dan Rather — who teared up at the film’s recent Toronto FIlm Festival premiere — has given his full backing of Truth. “Naturally I was pleased, and pleasantly surprised,” he told THR in an interview. “This film is very accurate. A film called Truth should be accurate.”
Redford, who recently starred in Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, is also in the midst of working on a music doc mini-series called American Epic, and the Disney reboot of Pete’s Dragon.
Truth begins its theatrical release on October 16.
