Latest in Harriet

EXCLUSIVE: Producer Daniela Taplin Lundberg's Stay Gold Features (Harriet) says it has secured $10 million in funding from undisclosed private investors for film and TV projects. Stay Gold Film Fund II will back in-house development and production and be managed by New York-based Taplin Lundberg, who with head of…

A Grammy, Tony and Drama Desk Award winner who first entered into the world of film in 2018, Cynthia Erivo has quickly established herself as a force to be reckoned with in this arena. The star of Harriet, Kasi Lemmons' drama on slave-turned-abolitionist Harriet Tubman, Erivo earned two Oscar nominations today, for…

It is no secret that the Hollywood Foreign Press was put under fire for shutting out women in the Best Director category at this year’s Golden Globes. In fact, the amount of women, people of color and underrepresented voices were fairly thin across all categories. Deadline talked to female filmmakers, producers and…

The Broadway revival of The Color Purple netted Cynthia Erivo a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. It also led, by chance, to her movie breakthrough: the opportunity to play famed 19th century abolitionist and escaped slave Harriet Tubman in Harriet. "I went to go see The Color Purple…on Broadway and sat…

On Kasi Lemmons' Harriet, Paul Tazewell was tasked with designing costumes for slave-turned-abolitionist Harriet Tubman—a legendary figure, whose looks were nonetheless only documented in a handful of photographs. "There are a number of photographs of her—I think maybe five that we are familiar with. Most of those…

Multiple-award-winning actress Cynthia Erivo has entered Golden Globes race with two nominations, one for her starring performance as famous abolitionist and American hero Harriet Tubman in the Focus Features biopic, Harriet, as well as for the film’s original song Stand Up which co-wrote with Joshuah Brian Campbell.…

The determined struggles of true-life heroes, whose tales look to resonate loudly this awards season, were at the heart of Focus Features' Contenders NY presentation Saturday at the DGA Theater in New York City. For Harriet writer/director Kasi Lemmons (who helmed both Eve's Bayou and Talk To Me) the task was to offer…

"I had known about her since I was little," Harriet star Cynthia Erivo said of the iconic Underground Railroad hero Harriet Tubman. "I felt like she was a superhero to me and I wanted to make sure the world saw her as a human being and a woman," added the British-born Tony and Grammy winner. In our discussion about…

There is absolutely no denying Harriet Tubman’s significance in American history: a famous conductor of the Underground Railroad who freed many enslaved people, a Union Army spy and an activist for women’s suffrage. But the story of the much-lauded perennial figure of the Civil Rights movement never had been…

Some crazy stories come out of Hollywood, but this one is truly unbelievable. According to Harriet screenwriter and producer, Gregory Allen Howard, Julia Roberts was suggested by a studio executive to play abolitionist Harriet Tubman. The Oscar-winning actress, who is white, looks nothing like Tubman, who was black…

Focus Features’ Harriet landed one of the prized slots of award season — a screening on Capitol Hill. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and the Congressional Black Caucus co-hosted a showing of the movie, a biopic of Harriet Tubman, at the theater in the Capitol…

4th Update/Writethru, Sunday AM after Saturday AM post: It’s not a good weekend for franchises, specifically old dusty ones like the sixth Terminator movie, Terminator: Dark Fate, which is seeing an apocalyptic future at the weekend domestic box office with $29M, per Paramount (rivals see it lower ,in the high $28M…