Halle Berry has been hoping to star in race/egal drama Tulia for quite some time, but the project has languished in development hell for long, long months. Well, not anymore - the world's most beautiful woman (well, certainly one of the top five) will get her chance to play a civil rights lawyer after all, with filming due to start on May 1 in Louisiana.
Tulia's story is based on real-life events in the town of Tulia, Texas in 1999, when 46 black men in the impoverished town were arrested in a drugs bust - a sting effort which resulted in the discovery of precisely no money, illegal weapons or drugs on any of the suspects (no money? That town really was pretty poor, huh?). Berry will be playing the lead attorney for the NAACP Defense Fund, which stepped in to help the citizens wrongly convicted on the basis of one crooked cop's testimony. Darn crooked cops, always causing mischief.
The story's based on Nate Blakeslee's non-fiction book "Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption In A Small Texas Town", with a script by Karen Croner, who has already adapted the screenplay of Daughter of the Queen of Sheba for Lasse Hallstrom. Carl Franklin (Devil in a Blue Dress, High Crimes) is in talks to direct. Let's hope the results of this small-town courtroom drama are more A Time To Kill and less A Civil Action.