plan b

Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt to Produce Adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ ‘The Water Dancer’ for MGM

Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt are teaming up to produce a film adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ best-selling novel “The Water Dancer” for MGM, Variety has confirmed.

Winfrey’s Harpo Films and Pitt’s Plan B will produce alongside Kamilah Forbes, who is the executive producer of the Apollo Theater. Forbes recently directed the theatrical adaptation of Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” as well as the upcoming HBO adaptation. Plan B and Harpo Films collaborated on the Oscar-nominated film “Selma” in 2014. Coates has adapted the novel for the screen.

“The Water Dancer” follows Hiram Walker, who was born enslaved and lost his mother at a young age. After almost drowning from crashing a carriage into a river, Hiram discovers that he has a mysterious power related to long-lost memories of his mother, and struggles to understand it.

December 11, 2020 by Josan plan b

‘Outer Range’ Mystery Drama Series For Amazon

Lili Taylor (Perry Mason), Tamara Podemski (Four Sheets to the Wind) and Tom Pelphrey (Ozark) are set as series regulars opposite Josh Brolin in Amazon’s mystery drama Outer Range, from playwright Brian Watkins, Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment and Amazon Studios.

Created by Watkins, Outer Range centers on Royal Abbott (Brolin), a rancher fighting for his land and family, who discovers an unfathomable mystery at the edge of Wyoming’s wilderness.

Taylor will portray Cecilia Abbott, the matriarch of the Abbott family. Cecilia is a woman of deep faith, which she finds tested as never before. Podemski will play Deputy Sheriff Joy. A life-long cop, Joy is running for county sheriff, and is the first gay Native American to ever do so in Wyoming. Pelphrey is Perry Abbott, the dutiful, eldest Abbott son, who is torn up inside by the lingering mystery of his missing wife.

October 31, 2020 by Josan plan b

Exclusive: Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Shaolin’ Album Netflix Movie Lands Director

Brittany Runs a Marathon helmer Paul Downs Colaizzo is set to direct the Netflix movie Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which purports to tell the true story behind controversial pharma bro Martin Shkreli‘s acquisition of the sole copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s album of the same name.

Ian Edelman (How to Make It in America) wrote the script, and Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA is expected to produce alongside Plan B, the production company owned by Brad Pitt. The project itself was first revealed last week in an STX press release about Edelman writing the Pete Davidson–O’Shea Jackson Jr. movie American Sole.

August 29, 2020 by Josan plan b

‘Paper Girls’ Series Based on Sci-Fi Comics Gets Amazon Greenlight

The paper girls’ next time travel destination is a future television show.

Amazon has given the greenlight to a series based on “Paper Girls,” the sci-fi graphic novels written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang. The series hails from Amazon Studios and Legendary Television, in association with Brad Pitt’s Plan B shingle.

“Paper Girls” follows four young girls who, while out delivering papers on the morning after Halloween in 1988, become unwittingly caught in a conflict between warring factions of time-travelers, sending them on an adventure through time that will save the world. As they travel between our present, the past, and the future — they encounter future versions of themselves and now must choose to embrace or reject their fate. The comics were first published in 2015, and there have been 30 issues to date.

August 20, 2020 by Josan plan b

Plan B, Searchlight Pictures Team to Adapt ‘The World According to Fannie Davis’

Author Bridgett M. Davis is adapting her own work while Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage is consulting on the project.
Plan B Entertainment, the Brad Pitt-fronted production banner behind Oscar winners Moonlight and 12 Years a Slave, has teamed up with Searchlight Pictures to adapt The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers, a memoir by Bridgett M. Davis.

Davis is writing the script. The project is also getting an assist from Lynn Nottage, who is acting as a consultant. Nottage, the only woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice for her plays Ruined and Sweat, is known for her work as a mentor of playwrights and a dramaturge, and will apply that skillset to the film project.

Plan B will produce.

Fannie Davis tells the true story of Davis’ mother, a woman who “made a way of no way” her motto as she did whatever it took to offer her children a middle-class life in 1960s and 1970s Detroit. In this case, it meant that Davis’ mother became part bookie and part banker to run a numbers racket out of her home, allowing her children to go to good schools and have nice clothes, all the while keeping the entire operation a secret.

The book was praised for being a look at a slice of Black America, showcasing what a marginalized class had to do to break down obstacles to the middle-class American Dream. The numbers, as the long-standing racket was known, was dominated by men and offered ways for the Black community to lift itself up from poverty by giving them access to cash when normal mainstream ways didn’t.

Director of production Zahra Phillips and manage of production Apolline Berty are overseeing for Searchlight. Gabby Shepard is running point for Plan B.

The banner last produced Ad Astra, which starred Pitt, and indie The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

Davis, the creative writing and journalism professor at Baruch College, is repped by CAA and Anjali Singh of Ayesha Pande Literary. Nottage, who is additionally an associate professor of playwriting at Columbia University, is repped by CAA and Manage-ment.

June 26, 2020 by Shann plan b The World According to Fannie Davis