Just a little over a year ago HBOWatch reported that a sequel to the Jay Roach directed HBO Films: GAME CHANGE was a certainty. The only thing missing was a script and the source material.
“Game Change” was a book by Mark Halperin and John Heileman about the 2008 election season that was adapted as a movie for Julianne Moore and Ed Harris as Sarah Palin and John McCain. The sequel book has been out for a while and it is called [amazon_link id=”1594204403″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]“Double Down”[/amazon_link] and is about the 2012 election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The New York Times had this blurb about it:
In their runaway bestseller Game Change, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann captured the full drama of Barack Obama’s improbable, dazzling victory over the Clintons, John McCain, and Sarah Palin. With the same masterly reporting, unparalleled access, and narrative skill, Double Down picks up the story in the Oval Office, where the president is beset by crises both inherited and unforeseen—facing defiance from his political foes, disenchantment from the voters, disdain from the nation’s powerful money machers, and dysfunction within the West Wing. As 2012 looms, leaders of the Republican Party, salivating over Obama’s political fragility, see a chance to wrest back control of the White House—and the country. So how did the Republicans screw it up? How did Obama survive the onslaught of super PACs and defy the predictions of a one-term presidency? Double Down follows the gaudy carnival of GOP contenders—ambitious and flawed, famous and infamous, charismatic and cartoonish—as Mitt Romney, the straitlaced, can-do, gaffe-prone multimillionaire from Massachusetts, scraped and scratched his way to the nomination.
Double Down exposes blunders, scuffles, and machinations far beyond the klieg lights of the campaign trail: Obama storming out of a White House meeting with his high command after accusing them of betrayal. Romney’s mind-set as he made his controversial “47 percent” comments. The real reasons New Jersey governor Chris Christie was never going to be Mitt’s running mate. The intervention held by the president’s staff to rescue their boss from political self-destruction. The way the tense détente between Obama and Bill Clinton morphed into political gold. And the answer to one of the campaign’s great mysteries—how did Clint Eastwood end up performing Dada dinner theater at the Republican convention?
In Double Down, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann take the reader into back rooms and closed-door meetings, laying bare the secret history of the 2012 campaign for a panoramic account of an election that was as hard fought as it was lastingly consequential.
Now there is no news about the tele-movie, but just the fact that the book has been published means the work can start to be written as a movie script. Then we can start wondering if our current President will be acted by someone or just handled via archive footage and imagine who will play Mitt Romney. HBO and Jay Roach are far from over in looking at the GOP in a particularly satiric light and HBOWatch will be there tracking this film as it develops.
