Spike Lee’s Rodney King film is coming to Netflix… | Little White Lies

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Spike Lee’s Rod­ney King film is com­ing to Net­flix next month

09 Mar 2017

Words by Jack Godwin

Circular black and white eye icon with radiating lines.
Circular black and white eye icon with radiating lines.
The direc­tor has adapt­ed Roger Guen­veur Smith’s one-man show.

Net­flix has acquired the dis­tri­b­u­tion rights to Rod­ney King, direct­ed by Spike Lee and star­ring Roger Guen­veur Smith. The film fol­lows the life of the late civ­il rights fig­ure, whose bru­tal treat­ment at the hands of the Los Ange­les police trig­gered a series of riots across the city in 1992.

Smith has been per­form­ing the sto­ry as a one-man show for the last four years across the US, with the show due to fin­ish lat­er this year. When King died in 2012 fol­low­ing a long bat­tle with alco­hol and drug abuse, the actor described how he was struck with how much I was moved, how much this trag­ic fig­ure mat­tered to me.”

The film fol­lows on from the huge suc­cess of doc­u­men­tary OJ: Made In Amer­i­ca, which also focus­es heav­i­ly on the racial ten­sions in Los Ange­les around the time of the Rod­ney King inci­dent. Addi­tion­al­ly, we’re also expect­ing to see John Ridley’s doc­u­men­tary Let it Fall: LA 1982 – 1992 lat­er this year.

Coin­cid­ing with the 25th anniver­sary of the acquit­tals of the LAPD offi­cers filmed beat­ing King, Lee’s film is set to pre­miere on 28 April.

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