For a few months now, Precious director Lee Daniels has been working on a civil rights movie called Selma, and now, in a USA Today report that follows the helmer’s activities during Oscar week (which largely seems to be about what shoes he’s going to wear), Daniels reveals that, “I have to really start casting the movie [Selma] because we’re shooting it soon. The only person I’ve nailed in for sure is Hugh Jackman. It’s all over the place.”
He doesn’t say what role Jackman is up for, although as the movie is said to focus on Martin Luther King and his wife, as well as President Lyndon B. Johnson, it would seem Jackman would be up for a supporting role. It also appears that reports a while back that Robert De Niro had signed up as Alambama Governor George Wallace were premature. From what Daniels has said, it doesn’t mean De Niro won’t be in the film, just that he isn’t locked in.
The film will be about the three marches that took place in Selma, Alabama in 1965. The first march planned to go from Selma to the State Capital, Montgomery, but was stopped after only six blocks by police and state troopers after Governor Wallace decided it was a threat to public safety (Wallace hated anything pro-desegregation and was one of the most powerful, vitriolic and visible forces against the civil rights movement). Protesters were them clubbed, gassed and whipped, with the TV footage of the violence shocking the US and galvanising support for civil rights.
A second, symbolic march took place two days later, led by Martin Luther King Jr., which only went as far as the bridge where the previous protesters were stopped, because a court injuction prevented them going all the way to Montgomery. A week later the injuction was lifted and a third march set out, this time making it all the way to the state capital.
It was these marches and the public horror at the beatings of demonstrators that spurred Congress to start drafting laws that ended up with the Voting Rights Act, which for the first time explicitly gave African-Americans the right to vote.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see who Jackman ends up playing in the film. Whoever it is, it’s a story that well worth telling.