Universal Pictures to Produce Paul Greengrass' Martin Luther King Drama MEMPHIS

Universal Pictures is stepping up to produce Paul Greengrass' film Memphis, which is a drama that revolves around the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.. Greengrass will write and direct the film. Here's a little more information on the film from a previous report,

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 will no doubt spark a little controversy. It will be interesting to see how this movie turns out now that it has 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. The film is also being produced by Scott Rudin who also was a producer on The Social Network and True Grit. 

Production on the film is scheduled to start in June.