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Just a day after news broke that Leonardo DiCaprio and Paramount Pictures had landed the rights to the classic 1990s cartoon series Captain Planet, the Oscar-winner now has his eye on TRUEVINE: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest; A True Story of the Jim Crow South, the latest non-fiction best-seller from author Beth Macy. DiCaprio will produce through his Appian Way shingle with Jennifer Davisson and the property is expected to be developed as a potential starring vehicle.
The story begins in 1899 on a sweltering tobacco farm in the Jim Crow South town of Truevine, Virginia following George and Willie Muse, two little boys born to a sharecropper family. One day a white man offered them a piece of candy, setting off events that would take them around the world and change their lives forever.
Captured and brought into the circus, the Muse brothers performed for royalty at Buckingham Palace and headlined over a dozen sold-out shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden. They were global superstars in a pre-broadcast era. But the very root of their success was in the color of their skin and in the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume: supposed cannibals, sheep-headed freaks, even “Ambassadors from Mars.” Back home, their mother never accepted that they were “gone” and spent 28 years trying to get them back.
Truevine joins a long list of projects in development at DiCaprio’s Appian Way, including The Devil in the White City, The Deep Blue Goodbye, and Outlaw Ocean based on the articles from New York Times Magazine reporter Ian Urbina.
Macy is repped on the deal by Peter McGuigan of Foundry Literary + Media with Richie Kern handling the film rights.
—TO SEE ALL THE PROJECT DETAILS CLICK HERE—
Josh Lyons | Managing Editor
This news was first reported by Deadline.
