It’s been talked about for years but it now appears a biopic of American track and field star Jesse Owens is off the blocks. TRAINING DAY director and the helmer of next years THE EQUALIZER, Antoine Fuqua, has been tapped by Disney to direct the big-screen adaptation of the best-selling book ‘Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics‘ by Jeremy Schaap. It tells of the legendary athlete who bravely walked away with four gold medals during the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, in the face of racial prejudice from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
TRIUMPH will have screenplay by Oscar-winning screenwriter David Seidler (THE KING’S SPEECH) and is expected to begin shooting early next year. Below is official plot synopsis of Schaap’s book.
At the 1936 Olympics, against a backdrop of swastikas and goose-stepping storm troopers, an African-American son of sharecroppers won a staggering four gold medals and single-handedly demonstrated that Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy was a lie. The story of Jesse Owens at the Berlin games is that of an athletic performance that transcends sports. It is also the intimate and complex tale of one remarkable man’s courage. Drawing on unprecedented access to the Owens family, previously unpublished interviews, and exhaustive archival research, Jeremy Schaap transports us to Germany and tells the dramatic tale of Owens and his fellow athletes at the contest dubbed the Nazi Olympics.
Source: Variety
