Although Wesley Snipes undoubtedly has his hands full, given his alleged problems with the IRS over unpaid taxes, he is nonetheless trying to press on with a pet project about FBI-head J. Edgar Hoover’s attempts to discredit Martin Luther King Jr.
Snipes intends to produce the Justin Stamm penned script and is hoping to find a role for himself in the piece as well.
Deadline say that he recently sat down with King’s son, Martin Luther King III and received the family’s blessing to pursue the project, which tells of William Sullivan, then assistant director of the FBI and his analysis of the perceived threat posed by King and the appropriate manner to address that threat. He apparently wrote to Hoover:-
“We must mark [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation. It may be unrealistic to limit ourselves as we have been doing to legalistic proofs or definitely conclusive evidence that would stand up in testimony in court or before Congressional Committees.”
Sullivan is said to have then become conscience-stricken over the FBI’s approach to King. Deadline continue as follows:-
The script takes the position that Sullivan’s conscience about such outrageous behavior caught up to him, and that he felt conflicted about his actions because he admired King’s efforts, but never spoke up before the assassination. He then bared Hoover and the bureau’s dirty laundry to journalist friend Jack Taylor for a book Sullivan hoped would expose his boss as a hypocrite and a tyrant. Right after telling his story, Sullivan was shot and killed — it was called a “hunting accident” — shortly before testifying about the killings of King and John F. Kennedy before the House Select Committee on assassinations. A sanitized version of the book eventually appeared.
The project is currently named “Code Name Zorro” and will follow Sullivan’s actions such as phone-tapping, playing King’s conversations with other women to his wife and generally tarnishing his reputation, before presumably experiencing the change of heart referred to above.
Snipes himself said of the project:-
“I was attracted to the whistleblower dynamic. It’s a challenging situation for a man to be in, to be among the shadowy and most powerful men in the world, who exposed information to mislead the public. What an interesting conflict and life dilemma. It makes for good drama and there are great roles for actors to play these historical figures who are part of a whole story that many of us weren’t aware of.”
Whether this will give the finished film shades of Michael Mann’s excellent “The Insider”, we will see. In other Snipes-related news, he said that “maybe” they would get around to making another Blade film and that although he would have thought the studio would have approached him, many other actors seemed to be interested.
Whether this means another recasted reboot is on the cards, like Spider-Man, Batman and Superman, who knows? Certainly there should be plenty of life left in the Blade franchise, even if Blade: Trinity represented something of a drop in quality from the first two films.
