Marshall director Reginald Hudlin has signed on to direct Beyond the Velvet Rope, a musical film that will be based on the original music of Andreas Carlsson. The prolific Swedish songwriter has penned hits for the likes of Celine Dion, Katy Perry, Britney Spears NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard and Americ…

Fast and Furious franchise star Vin Diesel will star in STX’s new action-comedy Muscle which will be produced by the actor and Samantha Vincent through their One Race Films. Also producing will be Reginald Hudlin and Byron Phillips who brought the project to STX which is looking to make the IP into a franchise. The…

Half a century ago today, Martin Luther King Jr was shot dead in Memphis while supporting striking black sanitation workers in that southern city. For a nation still severed today along stark racial and economic lines, the death at age 39 of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning preacher and civil rights icon on the evening…

EXCLUSIVE: Mira Sorvino has been named the inaugural recipient of the UCLA Law Promise Institute Award for Contribution to Human Rights Through the Arts. Sorvino will accept the award at UCLA's summit Lights. Camera. Reaction: The Art of Impact in Entertainment at the Hammer Museum on March 16. Many Hollywood voices…

“What I loved about the script when I read it is it didn’t feel like I had to know who Thurgood Marshall was in order to enjoy the story,” said Chadwick Boseman of what attracted him to the lead role in Marshall. “Once I saw that, I was like, now I have a certain amount of freedom to explore who was he in this time…

Marshall star Chadwick Boseman and director Reginald Hudlin were joined on The Contenders stage by producer Paula Wagner and songwriter Diane Warren to discuss the biopic about the civil rights revolutionary Thurgood Marshall. “I didn’t feel like I needed to know who Marshall was to enjoy the film we created,” said…

The ACLU of Southern California this year is honoring Judd Apatow, Viola Davis, Jane Fonda, Reginald Hudlin, Dolores Huerta and Gina Rodriguez on Dec. 3 to pay tribute to individuals who are making a difference in the struggle to fulfill the historic promise of “liberty and justice for all" and helping to preserve…

Here's a cultural paradox: Even as American universities and their students are fleeing history at a frightful rate, movies, at least of the sort that contend for awards, are digging ever deeper into nooks and crannies of the past. On the academic front, the Harvard scholar Niall Ferguson has described some trends…

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences addressed its dearth of diversity today by appointing three new governors: Oscars producer Reginald Hudlin (repping the Directors Branch), Oscar-nominated scribe Gregory Nava (Writers Branch) and Kung Fu Panda veteran Jennifer Yuh Nelson (Short Films and Feature…

EXCLUSIVE: As the film world converges on Park City on the eve of Sundance, Netflix is expanding its global indie film strategy with a slate of new features to be financed and distributed by the SVOD giant. The five features are Ryan Koo’s Amateur, Tony Elliott’s ARQ, Alistair Legrand’s Clinical, Osgood Perkins‘ I Am T…

EXCLUSIVE: Josh Gad has joined Chadwick Boseman in the case of Marshall, the biopic about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall being directed by Reginald Hudlin. Gad, who next will play Roger Ebert opposite Will Ferrell in STX’s Russ & Roger, steps into a key role in the movie — that of insurance lawyer Sam…

BREAKING: Chadwick Boseman, who will next be seen in Disney/Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War, will star as the highly respected Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall — the first African American judge on that court — in the courtroom thriller that follows Marshall as a young lawyer through one of his…