Please allow me a quick statement of joy: At last! For thirty years, since the publication of Parting the Waters in 1988, I have been trying and failing to move authentic civil rights history from the printed page to film. Thanks to HBO and Kunhardt Films, my long quest will end on Monday, April 2 with HBO’s premier broadcast of “King in the Wilderness.” I’m an executive producer along with screenwriter Trey Ellis and HBO VP Jackie Glover.
Our documentary presents an anguished, non-sanitized Martin Luther King, whose “Dream” speech has turned into a nightmare. There is no narrator to summarize King, nor any historical commentators like myself re-interpret his movement. Instead, nineteen eyewitnesses relive King’s tumultuous final years, 1965-1968. Many of the witnesses are famous. All of them should be.
This MLK is driven. He challenges every citizen to uphold the democratic experiment, seeking nothing less than to “redeem the soul of America” from mankind’s triple scourges of bigotry, war, and poverty.
I hope viewers of “King in the Wilderness” find something new and pertinent to our time. If you have questions about the film, or how it was made, please submit them via Twitter to @taylorbranch, adding the hashtag #askKITW if you want others to follow the discussion
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