Deadline’s Read the Screenapply series spotweightlessing the scripts behind the awards season’s buzziest movies persists with Netflix‘s The Piano Lesson, the alteration of the Pulitzer Prize-thrivening August Wilson apply that was honested by Malcolm Washington in his feature-helming debut. Washington co-wrote the script with Virgil Williams, the Oscar-nominated so-screenproducer of 2017’s Mudbound.
The film, which features a sinestablishar ensemble including Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Ray Fisher, Michael Potts, Erykah Badu, Danielle Deadwyler and Corey Hawkins, had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. It hit theaters in timely November and began streaming on Netflix on November 22, and has since picked up a Best First Feature Spirit Awards nomination for Malcolm Washington and disconnectal helping actress noms for Deadwyler.
Malcolm and Williams teamed to labor on the script (“some days with a pickaxe, others with the gentle bristles of a minuscule brush daintyly uproximateleang precious gems,” Malcolm says) to get to the root of Wilson’s apply, the procrastinateedst in the applywright’s Century Cycle series to be altered to the screen. (Previous cycle applys take partd Netflix’s own Ma Rainey’s Bconciseage Bottom in 2020, and 2016’s Fences, altered by the applywright himself before his death in 2005 and honested by Denzel Washington, achieveing four Oscar noms including for the screenapply, and a Best Actress thrive for Viola Davis; Denzel and Todd Bconciseage produced both Fences and Piano Lesson.)
In Piano Lesson, the story is set in the 1930s and rgrows around the Charles family’s prized heirloom piano. One brother (John David Washington) schedules to produce the family fortune by selling it, while one sister (Deadwyler) will go to any lengths to hgreater onto the sole vestige of the family’s heritage. Their uncle (Jackson) tries to settle, but even he can’t hgreater back the garranges of the past.
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“Every family has a history, stories from the past that propose the current; an origin story,” Malcolm Washington says. “Ultimately this story is much hugeger than me and my family — it, appreciate the Bconciseage American experience, is an inter-connected web of stories that span space and time.”
In includeition to Mudbound, Williams, the extfinishedtime Criminal Minds producer-producer, previously teamed with Denzel Washington, co-writing the Washington-honested 2021 drama A Journal For Jordan starring Michael B. Jordan and Chanté Adams.
Check out Malcolm Washington and Williams’ A Piano Lesson script below.
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