Steven Spielberg reportedly working on Walter Cronkite feature

Award-winning director said planning collaboration project on veteran newscaster’s role in changing public opinion of Vietnam War

Award-winning director Steven Spielberg is reportedly working on a feature project about the late veteran newscaster Walter Cronkite and his role in turning American public opinion against the Vietnam War.

Spielberg would team up for the project with his “Bridge of Spies” crew — screenwriter Matt Charman and producer Marc Platt — Deadline first reported Tuesday.

Charman suggested the idea to Spielberg while they were garnering awards for “Bridge of Spies.” He reportedly is working on the script.

Cronkite, who died in 2009, was nicknamed “the most trusted man in America,” and presented the evening news on CBS for nearly two decades. He was the first to break the news to stunned Americans that President Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963.

CBS newsman Walter Cronkite speaks at a ceremony at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington celebrating the 35th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2004. (Wikimedia Public Domain)

A little less than five years later, Cronkite wrote after a visit to war-torn Vietnam: “To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn4w-ud-TyE

Spielberg, whose film “The BFG” is set to be released on July 1, is also gearing up to direct a film about the struggle of 19th century Jewish parents to regain their son who was forcibly taken to be raised as a Christian after secretly being baptized.

The script for “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara” was written by the Tony Award-winning American playwright Tony Kushner based on the nonfiction book by Pulitzer Prize winner David Kertzer.

The 1997 book tells the story of a 6-year-old boy who was seized from his family’s home in 1858 after his baptism as an infant by the family’s serving girl. The family went up against Pope Pius IX, who took a personal interest in the boy, in their efforts to have him returned in a case that became an international cause celebre.

Spielberg, who is Jewish, “has been attached to this film for some time,” Variety reported.

Mark Rylance, who won a best supporting actor Oscar for his starring role in “Bridge of Spies,” is set to play Pope Pius IX. He also provides the voice of the eponymous BFG (Big Friendly Giant) in the Spielberg movie.