You’ve got to love Brian Dennehy. For decades now he’s the man you bring in if you need a quick dash of talent and understated cool in your movie. He’s appeared in everything from First Blood and Cocoon to Romeo + Juliet and Ratattouille. He’s also an accomplished stage actor, having won two Tonys and an Olivier Award. God bless him.
Now the 71-year-old is adding film director to his resume, with a fact-based drama called Redemption, about Joyce Ann Brown, who spent more than nine years in prison for a 1980 fur store robbery and murder in Dallas that she didn’t commit, and Jim McCloskey, a crusader for the wrongly convicted, who fought for her release.
Filming is set to begin in the spring, and while it sounds like a small-scale project that may go straight-to-DVD, he’s certainly a man who knows a lot about films, and as he’s co-written the screenplay as well, he may have fouind a way to raise the material above film-of-the-week status. There’s no news on the cast as yet.