Fifty Shades Of Grey’s Sam Taylor-Johnson is making a “Ted Kennedy thriller”

By Sam Barsanti | December 14, 2015 | 11:58pm

Aux Features Film

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fifty Shades Of Grey director Sam Taylor-Johnson has found her next project, and it’s significantly less sexy than that one. The film will be titled Chappaquiddick, and in a convenient bit of timeliness, it’ll be based on a script that just made the 2015 Blacklist. For anybody who’s younger than, say, 50 and doesn’t immediately recognize what the name Chappaquiddick is a reference to, the movie will be about an incident in 1969 in which a young Senator Ted Kennedy drove a car off a bridge, swam to safety, and left his passenger (a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne) behind. Kopechne died from suffocation after a few hours, and Kennedy neglected to tell anyone about what happened until the next morning, long after it was too late to save her.

The script was written by Taylor Allen and Andre Logan, and it’s described as “a political thriller” that will apparently “unveil the true story” of “the seven most dramatic days of Senator Ted Kennedy’s life.”