Mike Fleming  EXCLUSIVELionsgate has acquired screen rights to
Devil In The Grove: Thurgood Marshall, The Groveland Boys, And
The Dawn Of A New America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by
Gilbert King about the effort of Thurgood Marshall and the
NAACP’s legal team to save the lives of four black men falsely
accused of raping a white woman in Florida in 1949. Adam Cooper
& Bill Collage will write the script. Allison Shearmur is
producing. The project is high priority at Lionsgate where
production president Erik Feig and production and development
director Jeyun Choi are overseeing it.  Devil In The Grove will
yield a great role for a fortyish African-American actor to play
the iconic Marshall, in a case fought to the Supreme Court
before he made history with Brown Vs. Board of Education, which
finally eliminated segregation in public schools. The scribes
are also planning a strong role of Mabel Norris Reese, a
journalist who covered the case. Initially outraged by the rape
charges, she wrote honest stories as