Paul Greengrass Directing a Martin Luther King Jr. Film

Director Paul Greengrass is planning to direct a new film based around the events that lead up to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee.  The film will be called Memphis, and here is the report from Vulture,

Insiders tell us that Greengrass wrote the movie — titled simply Memphis — based on his own original research, and that it looks at King’s life while trying to organize the city’s sanitation workers in the spring of 1968, just before his murder on April 4 of that year. If so, that’d make for a much more human portrayal of King than some might expect. By the spring of 1968, King’s personal and professional lives were in disarray: His marriage was faltering; he was chain-smoking, boozing, and packing on the pounds. King’s outspokenness on the Vietnam War cost him his relationship with President Johnson, and his newfound interest in labor organization and the urban poor put him on the fringes of the rising Black Power movement.

This sounds like it could spark a little controversy, but that just means the movie will get more attention and make more money. It will be interesting to see how this movie turns out if it gets a greenlight. There's no doubt it will end up being a fascinating movie especially if it dives into the conspiracy theories surrounding King’s murder in which James Earl Ray implicated everyone from the CIA, the FBI, the mafia, the Green Berets, LBJ, the Memphis Police and Fire Departments, and even the Boy Scouts of America.

Greengrass is a great director that has made films such as The Bourne Supremacy, United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum and Green Zone.