Oscar-nominated filmmaker RaMell Ross (Hale County This Morning, This Evening) has been tapped to direct a feature adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys for MGM’s Orion Pictures, with Oscar nom Aunjanue L.
Ellis (King Richard), Ethan Herisse (When They See Us), Brandon Wilson (The Way Back), Hamish Linklater (The Big Short) and Fred Hechinger (News of the World) set to star.
The 2020 novel by Whitehead, who’d previously scored a Pulitzer for 2016’s The Underground Railroad, came in as a bestseller upon its publication by Doubleday, also being named one of Time‘s best books of the decade.
Based on the true story of a Florida reform school that damaged the lives of thousands of children over more than a century, its protagonist is Elwood Curtis, a Black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee who is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, then finding himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors.
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