Kevin Costner Joins 1960s-Set Space Film HIDDEN FIGURES

Ever since Kevin Costner did The Hatfields and The McCoys for the History Channel, his career got a second wind. He’s now set to star in a new film project called Hidden Figures. The story is set in the 1960s, and this is a brief summary we got thanks to Variety:

The story centers on Johnson, a brilliant African-American mathematician who, along with her colleagues Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in U.S. history — the momentous launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, and his safe return. Glenn flew the Friendship 7 mission in 1962 and became the first American to orbit the Earth. The three women crossed all gender, race and professional boundaries by embarking on the mission.

Costner will play the head of the NASA space program and he will be joined by Taraji P. Henson (Empire) as Katherine Johnson and Octavia Spencer (The Help) in an unspecified role. This movie reunites Costner and Spencer, who co-starred in the racial drama Black or White.

The film is based on an upcoming book by Margot Lee Shetterly called Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. The book is being adapted into script form by Allison Schroeder (Mean Girls 2). Here's the book description:

Set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program—and whose contributions have been unheralded, until now.

Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as “Human Computers,” calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws, these “colored computers,” as they were known, used slide rules, adding machines, and pencil and paper to support America’s fledgling aeronautics industry, and helped write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Drawing on the oral histories of scores of these “computers,” personal recollections, interviews with NASA executives and engineers, archival documents, correspondence, and reporting from the era, Hidden Figures recalls America’s greatest adventure and NASA’s groundbreaking successes through the experiences of five spunky, courageous, intelligent, determined, and patriotic women: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, Christine Darden, and Gloria Champine.

Moving from World War II through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the women’s rights movement, Hidden Figures interweaves a rich history of scientific achievement and technological innovation with the intimate stories of five women whose work forever changed the world—and whose lives show how out of one of America’s most painful histories came one of its proudest moments.

Costner will next be seen in the action-thriller Criminal, which opens on April 15th.

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