WWE Studios has acquired rights to adapt Franklin Martin’s documentary Long Shot: The Kevin Laue Story to a feature film, and has tapped Soul Surfer scribe Kara Holden to adapt it. The 2013 documentary followed Laue, who become the first player missing a limb to play NCAA Division I basketball. A director search is underway.
The Long Shot movie will detail Laue’s journey from Pleasanton, CA to the basketball court of Manhattan College in New York, where he joined the team in 2009. WWE Studios will handle worldwide rights and use its platforms to market the pic. Laue and Martin’s Dutchmen Films are repped by Gersh and attorney Jeff Silberman of King, Holmes.
RLJ Entertainment has acquired North American rights excluding theatrical to Thomas K Phillips’ debut feature The North Star, a slavery drama that is being released September 18 by its production company LuckPig Studios in Philadelphia, where the movie was filmed. It will expand to New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC and Chicago later in the fall. RLJ will premiere the pic on its UMC – Urban Movie Channel in 2016. Former Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Jeremiah Trotter and Thomas C Bartley Jr star as two slaves who escaped from a Virginia plantation and made their way to freedom in Buckingham, PA in 1849. Clifton Powell, Lynn Whitfield, John Diehl, Keith David, Christopher Mann and April Woodall co-star.
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