The repeated and lengthy attempts to bring the Martin Luther King jnr story to the screen could finally be about to bear fruit, with The Wire creator David Simon signed up for a HBO six-hour miniseries.
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The project will be produced by Oprah Winfrey, who acquired the Pulitzer Prize-winning book trilogy on which the series will be based, America: In the King Years by Taylor Branch. Simon will pen the first episode and outline the entire series, reports Deadline.com, working with his Treme co-creator Eric Overmyer.
Winfrey is also backing another King project in Selma, about the 1965 voting rights campaign, to be directed by Ava DuVernay.
Writer-director Oliver Stone, however, backed away from another biopic, which was to star Jamie Foxx, after a dispute with the studios. He claimed on Twitter that DreamWorks and Warner Bros, who were working closely with King's estate which owns the copyright on his iconic speeches, rejected his script which touched on King's rumoured adultery.
At the time he said: "I'm told the estate & the 'respectable' black community that guard King's reputation won't approve it. They suffocate the man & the truth."
Also in the background is a Paul Greengrass project titled Memphis, which focuses on the leader's final days and has been floating around for years. It too has run into problems over its depiction of King, falling foul of King's confidant Andrew Young over its depiction of King's affairs, but nearly got the go-ahead in 2012 before Greengrass ploughed ahead with Captain Phillips instead.
