Monday, March 18, 2024

Barry Jenkins Developing Amazon Series Based on Colson Whitehead Novel ‘The Underground Railroad’

Barry Jenkins poses with the Best Adapted Screenplay award for 'Moonlight' he arrives to the Vanity Fair Party following the 88th Academy Awards at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California, on February 26, 2017.
Barry Jenkins poses with the Best Adapted Screenplay award for ‘Moonlight’ he arrives to the Vanity Fair Party following the 88th Academy Awards at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California, on February 26, 2017.

*The Underground Railroad is the subject of yet another series.

“Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins is developing an original limited drama called “The Underground Railroad” for Amazon based on the best-selling novel by the same name, the company announced Monday.

The one-hour drama tells the story of a young slave name Cora who attempts to flee her Georgia plantation in the pre-Civil War South. However, in the novel written by Colson Whitehead, Cora discovers the Underground Railroad to be a real subway line with trains and conductors underneath the ground.

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“Colson’s writing has always defied convention, and ‘The Underground Railroad’ is no different,” Jenkins said in a statement. “It’s a groundbreaking work that pays respect to our nation’s history while using the form to explore it in a thoughtful and original way.”

“Preserving the sweep and grandeur of a story like this requires bold, innovative thinking and, in Amazon, we’ve found a partner whose reverence for storytelling and freeness of form is wholly in line with our vision,” he continued.

Colson’s book was a New York Times bestseller, won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and was included on Oprah’s Book Club list last year. Watch her interview with Whitehead about the book below:

Pastel Productions, the company that Jenkins co-founded, will once again team up with Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment to executive produce the new Amazon project. Those studios created “Moonlight.”

 

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