MACRO and Franklin Leonard to Produce Reginald F. Lewis Biopic ‘Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?’
The late pioneering Black businessman Reginald F. Lewis is getting the biopic treatment from Charles D. King’s MACRO and The Black List founder Franklin Leonard.
Based on Lewis’ bestselling autobiography, “Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?,” the drama will chronicle the improbable, “only-in-America” story of how Lewis rose to become the richest African American in the United States. A writer and director are yet to be attached.
The film follows Lewis as he broke glass ceilings from Baltimore to Harvard Law School (where he was the first person admitted without taking the LSAT and before even applying) to Wall Street to Kansas to Paris, up until his tragic, sudden death from a brain tumor in 1993 at the height of his powers. He was 50 years old.
Lewis was the first African American to raise a billion dollars and commanded the business world’s attention in 1987, with his $1 billion acquisition of Beatrice International Foods, making it the largest Black-owned business in the United States.
As the story traverses from boardrooms to family homes to lavish soirees, audiences will also experience how systemic racism takes a toll behind the scenes, even when an African American person is a proven master of the universe.
Producing alongside King and Leonard are MACRO’s Jelani Johnson and Poppy Hanks. Lewis’ widow Loida Lewis and his daughters Christina and Leslie Lewis will executive produce the project. Josh Green also serves as an executive producer, while Chris Lyons is billed as co-producer.
To read the original article, click here.
ABOUT MACRO
Launched in 2015 by Founder & CEO Charles D. King, MACRO is a multi-platform media company representing the voice and perspectives of Black people, indigenous people and people of color. The company’s multiple business verticals includes film (MACRO) and television studios (MACRO Television Studios) that finance, develop and produce theatrical and streaming features and premium television, talent (M88) and content creator (UNCMMN) representation divisions, a branding and creative agency (Brand MACRO) and an affiliated venture firm (MaC Venture Capital). The company’s film projects have fifteen Oscar nominations and three wins. MACRO Film Studios co-financed the critically acclaimed Judas and the Black Messiah, Mudbound, Fences, Roman J. Israel, Esq., Just Mercy, Sorry to Bother You, Nine Days, Farewell Amor, Blast Beat, The Land and Blue Bayou. On the television side, the Netflix series’ Raising Dion and Gentefied are both executive produced by MACRO Television Studios. Go to https://www.staymacro.com/about for more information.
ABOUT FRANKLIN LEONARD
Franklin Leonard is a film and television producer, cultural commentator, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the Black List, the company that celebrates and supports great screenwriting and the writers who do it via film production, its annual survey of best unproduced screenplays, online marketplace, writer incubators, and live events. More than 400 scripts from the annual Black List survey have been produced as feature films earning more than 250 Academy Award nominations and 50 wins including four of the last thirteen Best Pictures and eleven of the last twenty-four screenwriting Oscars. Franklin has worked in feature film development at Universal Pictures and the production companies of Will Smith, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, and Leonardo DiCaprio. He has been a juror at the Sundance, Toronto, and Mumbai Film Festivals, one of Hollywood Reporter’s 35 Under 35, Black Enterprise magazine’s 40 Emerging Leaders for Our Future, and Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business. The recipient of the 2019 Writers Guild of America, East (WGAe) Evelyn Burkey award for elevating the honor and dignity of screenwriters and the 2022 Presidential Proclamation from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, he is also a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Executives branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). His TED talk has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.