Fresh of one of the biggest upsets in the history of the Academy Awards, Director of Best Picture winner Moonlight is at back at work as he will write and direct the drama based on Colson Whitehead’s best-selling novel, The Underground Railroad for Amazon. The hourlong drama will be executive produced by Jenkins’ Pastel and Brad Pitt’s Plan B, both of which backed the Oscar winning film, Moonlight. The novel and its upcoming adaptation will chronicle a young woman’s journey as she makes her bid for freedom in the South. After escaping her Georgia plantation for the Underground Railroad, she discovers a railroad full of engineers and conductors, along with a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Jenkins states,
“Going back to The Intuitionist, Colson’s writing has always defied convention, and The Underground Railroad is no different, It’s a groundbreaking work that pays respect to our nation’s history while using the form to explore it in a thoughtful and original way. Preserving the sweep and grandeur of a story like this requires bold, innovative thinking and in Amazon we’ve found a partner whose reverence for storytelling and freeness of form is wholly in line with our vision.”
