The first image of Woody Harrelson as President Lyndon B. Johnson has been released. Robert Reiner will be directing the film, titled "LBJ".
The film centers on “the political upheaval that Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson confronted when he was thrust into the presidency at the hands of an assassin’s bullet in November, 1963." Harrelson's role is depicted as “the role of America’s 36th President, who encountered dramatic political battles on both sides of the aisle in his ascension to the nation’s highest office while attempting to heal a nation and secure his presidency by passing John F. Kennedy’s historic Civil Rights bill not long after his predecessor’s assassination.”
Reiner described Johnson with “During the sixties, I was a hippy and Lyndon Johnson was my president…and the target of most of my generation’s anti-Vietnam War anger. But, as time has passed and my understanding of political realities has grown, I’ve come to see LBJ in a very different light. He was a complex man — a combination of brilliant political instinct, raw strength, ambition, and deep insecurities. The strength and power of persuasion that he showed to his colleagues existed alongside of a soft, almost childlike quality that perhaps only Lady Bird got to see. His life’s path was nothing short of Shakespearean. From the poor hill country of West Texas to the corridors of power in Washington, he used his brilliant political acumen to pass the most groundbreaking civil rights legislation of the twentieth century. And, had it not been for the Vietnam War, I believe he would have gone down as one of America’s greatest presidents.”
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