12 Apr DEADLINE: Billy Porter To Star In, Co-Write James Baldwin Biopic For Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group Motion Pictures

Billy Porter (Pose) and frequent collaborator Dan McCabe (Fruits of Thy Labor) have been tapped to script a James Baldwin biopic for Byron Allen‘s Allen Media Group Motion Pictures, with the former also to realize his longtime dream of portraying the cultural icon.

The film will be based on the 1994 book James Baldwin: A Biography by David Leeming, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Connecticut who was a friend of Baldwin’s for 25 years, as well as his assistant.

A gay, African American writer and civil rights activist born in Harlem who wrote critically acclaimed and influential essays, novels, plays and poems, Baldwin’s best-known works include Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, Giovanni’s Room and If Beale Street Could Talk. Lemming’s biography of Baldwin creates an intimate portrait of a complex, troubled, driven and brilliant man, plumbing every aspect of his life, including his gift for compassion and love, the public pressures that overwhelmed his quest for happiness, and his passionate battle for Black identity and racial justice.