Gloria Steinem to be played by Carey Mulligan and Julianne Moore

by Murtada

2018 might become the year of Gloria Steinem at the movies. We’ve already told you about Dee Rees’ plans to make a film about the feminist movement’s fight to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, An Uncivil War. The project has lead parts for Steinem, activist Flo Kennedy and fundamentalist organizer Phyllis Schlafly. Rees has decided to continue collaborating with her Mudbound star Carey Mulligan and cast her as Steinem.

Director Julie Taymor (Frida, Across the Universe) and Playwright Sarah Ruhl will adapt Steinem’s memoir My Life on The Road. Their choice for the lead part is Julianne Moore. It looks like the Rees/Mulligan project will go before the cameras first, in March 2018. The Taymor/Moore film is still at the writing stage.

There is no reason why both movies could not be successful as they're telling different stories. One is about a particular moment in time with Steinem as one of three protagonists. The other centers squarely on her and is based on her memoir. Which of the two interests you more and why?

Dee Rees Bringing Flo Kennedy, Gloria Steinem, and The Fight for the ERA to the Big Screen in "An Uncivil War"

by Daniel Crooke

While her World War II-set Mississippi saga Mudbound continues to roll out across the fall festival circuit, steadily increasing its buzz along the way, rising director Dee Rees has set her sights on the feminist movement’s fight to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment for her next film: An Uncivil War. Particularly focusing on the work of iconic activists Flo Kennedy and Gloria Steinem in the early 1970s as they battle for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law for all citizens regardless of gender, and against archconservative forces led by fundamentalist organizer Phyllis Schlafly, FilmNation will finance the film with production set to begin early next year.

This is an exciting new chapter in Rees’s already distinguished filmography – which, in addition to Mudbound, includes her tender, achingly gorgeous debut Pariah and the Emmy-nominated Bessie – and the story is ripe for the moment. After so evocatively illustrating in her earlier work the ways in which hard-won personal identity can be met with retaliatory cultural reverberations from the close-mindedness within and around your own community, Rees has set herself up for success to dissect the multi-layered muddle of how this feminist moment impacted America. Indeed, in her own words: “I'm particularly interested in digging into the messiness of the women's movement — the many different alliances that were formed and fractured and exploring who got left behind vs who got remembered.” Personally this quote reminds me of the backroom brainstorm meetings between the fractious feminist street bands of Lizzie Borden’s dystopian docu-manifesto Born In Flames, a film which happens to feature Flo Kennedy in a galvanizing supporting performance as an elder stateswoman of the cause. That story, like this one, is a tale of intersectionality.

As An Uncivil War marches into pre-production, who would you cast as Flo Kennedy, Gloria Steinem, and Phyllis Schlafly?