The Obamas’ production company is tapping George C. Wolfe to direct a forthcoming film about the late gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin.
Wolfe, a five-time Tony Award winner who directed the recent adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” will be behind the camera for “Rustin” for Netflix, the media giant announced Thursday. The project seeks to tell the story of Rustin, who “overcame an onslaughts of obstacles, and altered the course of American history by organizing the 1963 march on Washington,” according to a Netflix news release about the film.
Then-President Obama posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rustin in 2013.
Dustin Lance Black, who garnered an Academy Award for writing the screenplay for 2018 biopic “Milk,” about gay rights advocate Harvey Milk, will pen the “Rustin” script.
The former president and Michelle Obama inked a multi-year deal with Netflix in 2018 to create content via their Higher Ground Productions.
The production company has said it’s “focused on telling the stories that embody the values the Obamas have championed throughout their lives.”
Among the projects recently announced by Higher Ground: a docuseries exploring “most wondrous national parks and wild spaces on Earth,” a feature film called “Exit West” based on Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 novel and “Tenzing,” a movie based on the real-life story of the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest.