Chris Rock will direct a Martin Luther King Jr. biopic with Steven Spielberg on board to produce

Chris Rock is getting behind the camera to direct a biopic about the life of the beloved activist Martin Luther King Jr.with Steven Spielberg on board to produce the film. Rock is in final negotiations to direct and produce the project, with Spielberg on board as executive producer. Universal Pictures is backing the biographical drama after optioning Jonathan Eig’s biopic “King: A Life.”

Eig’s book has been called the definitive biography of the late civil rights icon. He uses new FBI information and hundreds of interviews to paint a portrait of King as a “courageous but emotionally troubled individual who called for peaceful protest while grappling with his own frailties and a government that persecuted him.” Since the development process is early, casting has not been announced.

Rock, a four-time Emmy and three-time Grammy winner, has already directed “Top Five” in 2014, “Head of State” in 2003 and “I Think I Love My Wife” in 2007. We will see him in the director’s film George C. Wolfe “Rustin,” with Colman Domingo as the civil rights activist.

Here is the description of the book:

The first comprehensive biography in decades, King blends revealing and exhaustive new research with lively, accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s A Life is the first major biography in decades of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. — and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revealing new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who called for peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. It sheds new light on the origins of the King family and MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and other activists. King reveals a minister struggling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government and a man determined to fight for justice even if it turns out to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically recreates the journey of a man who reframed American race relations and became our only modern-day Founding Father, as well as our greatest martyr. cry of the nation.

In this seminal biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our profound thinker, brilliant strategist, and committed radical who led one of the greatest movements in history and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were during his lifetime . .

via: Variety