Culture

Tom Hanks Trailer for O'Reilly Lincoln Movie Almost as Dramatic as O'Reilly

Here's your first look at National Geographic Channel's new film Killing Lincoln, based on Bill O'Reilly's bestselling book. And, frankly, everything seems pretty heavy-handed in the time of Steven Spielberg's award-grabbing film about that same president

By Esther Zuckerman
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Look out Daniel Day-Lewis, Billy Campbell is on your tail. Entertainment Weekly has the trailer for the National Geographic Channel's new film Killing Lincoln, based on Bill O'Reilly's bestselling book. And, frankly, everything seems a little silly and heavy-handed in the time of Steven Spielberg's award-grabbing film about that same president — not that Lincoln doesn't have its moments of heavy-handedness, too.

Killing Lincoln is narrated by Spielberg pal Tom Hanks, who seems like a kind of bizarre choice for anything associated with O'Reilly, not in the least because another documentary he narrated was The Road We Traveled, produced by the Obama campaign. Other pedigreed names behind the film include Ridley Scott and his late brother Tony.

The trailer purports to show a behind the scenes, shall we say, account of Lincoln's assassination and a profile of John Wilkes Booth. "It's a look into the assassination of Abraham Lincoln that hasn't been equalled on film and I don't think anyone who sees it will be able to forget it," says Campbell, who plays the doomed president. "It's amazingly detailed and accurate—" Wait. Accurate, you say? Hmm. The Washington Post reported in November 2011 that the book, which is subtitled The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever and was co-written by Martin Dugard, was not being sold at Ford's Theatre because it "suffers from factual errors and a lack of documentation, according to a study conducted by Rae Emerson, the deputy superintendent of Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, which is a unit of the National Park Service." Therefore it was not sold at the NPS store associated with the theater.  ( Update: A commenter points out that the book is available at the online Ford's Theatre gift shop, the Washington Post noted in its original article that the book was available at the Ford's Theatre Society shop at the theater, just not the shop that was associated with the National Park Service.)

We can't embed the trailer, but here are some of the images from it. Check out that mood lighting:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.