Spielberg’s Martin Luther King movie still on front burner
Lights, camera … uh, where’s the action?
That seems like a logical question when it comes to Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg's long-planned epic about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
But there’s logic. And then there’s Hollywood.
“It’s certainly something that remains in development here,” said Marvin Levy, spokesman for Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios. “Everything revolves around the screenplay, particularly when you’re dealing with something as difficult and important and exciting as this.”
It was four years ago next month that DreamWorks excitedly announced it had acquired King’s “life rights” from his estate. But four years, apparently, is nothing.
” ‘Lincoln’ took something like 12 years to finally get made,” Levy pointed out.
Indeed, DreamWorks snapped up the film rights to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” in 2001. By the time Daniel Day Lewis accepted the Oscar for Best Actor this past February, “Lincoln” had run through at least three screenwriters and Liam Neeson as the earlier choice to play Honest Abe.
A possible King project cleared its first significant hurdle in October 2009 when a lawsuit between his surviving children — which included the charge that Dexter King had negotiated the film rights without the knowledge of siblings Bernice and Martin III — was quietly resolved. By the following January, Oscar-winning writer Ronald Harwood (“The Pianist”) was working on a script about the Atlanta civil rights icon.
Yet for the past two years, the project’s been in the hands of another writer, Kario Salem. Such churn is fairly typical of major Hollywood projects, said Levy, who didn’t know what had become of Harwood.
Levy’s boss rarely discusses his movies until they’re being made, but in India last month, Spielberg dropped a veil or two.
“There are still plans to do it,” Spielberg told the Times of India about the King movie, which he hasn’t made up his mind about directing.
“It’s a story of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. It also involves Martin Luther King’s love of Mahatma Gandhi and the words of Gandhi that helped shape Martin Luther King’s moral core,” he told the press there.
