For months now, King's family has been nervous about "Selma." Produced by Brad Pitt and "Slumdog Millionaire" Oscar-winner Christian Colson, the project's script portrays King (r.) as the tireless martyr of America's civil rights movement. But Paul Webb's screenplay also shows him to be a flesh-and-blood man who had, as his colleague Ralph Abernathy wrote, a "weakness for women."
In one scene, President Lyndon Johnson tells FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that he doesn't know or care "whether [King] has a gargantuan appetite for p- or whether he just sometimes needs a woman's touch when he's away from home ..."
In another scene at a Washington hotel, King meets a flirtatious woman who tells him, "You look like you need some tender loving care, honey."
"You're way out of my price bracket," says King.
"I'll donate part of my fee to the cause," she says.
Soon thereafter, Hoover's agents are seen recording King's lovemaking with the woman, as well as their postcoital conversation. King's wife, Coretta, receives a copy of the tape, with an anonymous blackmail letter.
The Nobel Prize winner actually received such a tape and letter. According to King biographer David Garrow, King explained his numerous extramarital affairs as "a form of anxiety reduction." In 1968, according to historian Taylor Branch, he admitted to Coretta that he'd carried on a five-year romance with a married woman.
Still, King's heirs are trying to keep his dalliances out of "Selma." Last week, a rep for Martin Luther King 3rd told us, "Our attorneys are reviewing the script."
But now, "Selma" director Lee Daniels tells us the Kings can relax. "The script they have is not my script," says Daniels, whose last movie, "Precious," has sparked major Oscar buzz.
Daniels is still "evaluating" the draft by Webb (who has written a script on Abraham Lincoln for Steven Spielberg). But Daniels says he doesn't believe the hooker scene is necessary.
"This project is still in an embryonic stage," he says. "But I can tell you my story focuses on the civil rights marches. It's not about tapes and prostitutes. It's about the African-American man who changed history."
Jacked from NY Daily News
8 comments:
rewriting history never does anyone favours.
how do you know that they are re writing history.. He was still a man.. My uncle told me stories of MLK and besides the marches MLK did other things.
they need to tell his life like it really was. he was human and had faults like every one else. tired of the history books only penning what they choose for people to believe.
Agreed! I want to know everything about Dr. King's life; including his adulterous behavior.
So what? He probably fucked other women,got high and drank like a fish when the cameras were off him. Just like celebs who claim to not do drugs are the main ones flying higher than Kazoo when there are no cameras around.
I'm glad Lee Daniels is not incorporating that aspect of King's life as it would be irrelevant. Now that he's done a movie w/Halle horny, near delirious and naked, two movies w/Monique as a crackhead it's about time he does something a little more cerebral.
black people in America once had an opportunity to spark a true revolution, but they chose to follow a man whose visions of a dream would lead us to lose what little identity we had by merging with a white society whose days are numbered as a ruling class as the 3rd world emerges.
Blacks were wrong about King.
Blacks were wrong about the Clintons.
Blacks only backed Obama when he was a clear favorite.
And blacks will continue to be socially and politically retarded, until they begin to think for themselves.
Hussein The Greatest!
This is just another ploy to overshadow the revolutionary change he brought to America. Who cares who he slept with, who cares how he relieved stress. Would you care if he got a massage? His sex life is between him and Coretta and since she is dead why is this being brought up again?
cosign 1:05am!!
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