Post by Admin on Apr 29, 2015 15:37:03 GMT -4
We have a long way to go before there are enough biopics about women and people of color to match the full century of movies about Great White Men. And what better way to start evening the score than with a biopic starring Viola Davis? The two-time Oscar nominee is set to star in an HBO movie about Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist and participant in the Underground Railroad who is easily one of the most famous women in American history.
The project, which Variety reports is likely to film during Davis’s hiatus next year from How to Get Away with Murder, will be written by John Adams’s Kirk Ellis, and produced, believe it or not, by Entourage’s Doug Ellin. It will be the third film about Tubman (none of which have been theatrical releases—but we’re focusing on the positive for now); the most famous version was a mini-series released in 1978, in which Tubman was played by Oscar nominee Cicely Tyson.
Technically Harriet Tubman has also been played by Davis’s The Help co-star Octavia Spencer, but we’re told that fictional Tracy Jordan productions don’t actually count.
Since earning an Oscar nomination for Doubt in 2008, Davis has vacillated between roles that seemed hugely unworthy of her talents (Law Abiding Citizen, Eat Pray Love, Prisoners, etc.) and towering performances that made it seem impossible that she wasn’t starring in everything (The Help, Get On Up, How to Get Away with Murder). It’s that ABC series, produced by powerhouse Shonda Rhimes, that has made Davis a bigger star than ever, and makes this Harriet Tubman project not just an overdue effort, but a blockbuster event. And with Tyson having recently played Davis’s mother on How to Get Away with Murder, there’s a touching sense of one generation handing Tubman’s story off to another. Who wants to place bets on a Tyson cameo somewhere in this new Tubman movie?
Harriet Tubman.
C....Can't wait to this history making film.
