Dick Wolf Lines Up ‘Murder In America: The Lynching Of Emmett Till’ Feature Documentary With Directors Sam Pollard & Llewellyn Smith

EXCLUSIVE: Dick Wolf and his Wolf Entertainment are planning a feature documentary about Emmett Till.

Wolf and his longtime collaborator Tom Thayer are exec producing Murder In America: The Lynching of Emmett Till, a two-hour feature documentary, alongside James Moll, the Oscar winner behind Holocaust doc The Last Days.

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It will be directed by Sam Pollard, who has directed documentaries including MLK/FBI, and Llewellyn Smith, who directed South to Black Power and produced American Experience.

Based on A Few Days Full of Trouble by Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr. and Christopher Benson, the feature doc will explore two parallel tracks of the Till story. One was set in motion by the last four years of an FBI investigation with details never revealed before, including significant new revelations of the case and its findings. The traumatic memory of Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., the last surviving witness to the crime and Emmett Till’s cousin, is driven by that investigation.

The second track is a deep immersion into the latest, proprietary findings of the case, as high school students prepare for the reenactment of the murder trial of two of Emmett Till’s killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam.

Till, a 14-year old boy, was abducted, tortured and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family’s grocery store. His murder and the acquittal of his killers brought national attention to the racial violence and injustice in the south and he posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.

Wolf and Thayer’s last collaboration for a single night film event was HBO’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, which aired on HBO and was based on the history of Native Americans in the American West in the 19^th Century.

It is not Wolf’s first foray into documentary; he produced Twin Towers, a 2002 short documentary film directed by Bill Guttentag and Robert David Port that depicted the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short at the 2003 Academy Awards.

Wolf Entertainment is also behind numerous docuseries including TNT’s Cold Justice, Fox’s First Responders Live, NBC’s LA Fire and Rescue and CNBC’s Blood & Money.

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