Antoine Fuqua To Direct Jesse Owens Biopic

Disney has tapped director Antoine Fuqua to helm the yet untitled Jesse Owens biopic, which counts with the Oscar winning screenwriter David Seidler to base the script on Jeremy Schaap’s book Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics.

For those that don’t know, Jesse Owens an African-American track and field star who won four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, but perhaps more important than winning the gold was the fact that Nazi Germany was starting to raise its ugly head, even so that Hitler refused to shake his hand after he won. Owens won the 100m sprint, the 200m sprint, the 4x 100m relay and the long jump.

Fuqua recently found success with Olympus Has Fallen, which already has a sequel scheduled, but it’s unclear if the director will return to direct it.

Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics Book Synopsis Via Amazon:

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 Drawing on unprecedented access to the Owens family, previously unpublished interviews, and exhaustive archival research, Jeremy Schaap transports us to Germany and tells the dramatic tale of Owens and his fellow athletes at the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.

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