‘Rustin’: Read The Screenplay For The Pic That Gives An Oft-Forgotten Civil Rights Icon His Due

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with Rustin, Netflix’s biopic of civil rights icon Bayard Rustin. Colman Domingo stars in the film, which is directed by Tony winner George C. Wolfe and hit theaters and the streamer in November after its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.

The screenplay co-written by Julian Breece and Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black focuses on one of the main architects of the 1963 March on Washington, where more than 200,000 hear Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall. Rustin was a fulcrum in the civil rights movement, working alongside the likes of King, Adam Clayton Powell Jr and Ella Baker, though as an openly gay man in that era he often had to work behind the scenes. He challenged authority and never apologized for who he was or what he believed.

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Alongside Domingo, the ensemble cast includes Chris Rock, Glynn Turman, Aml Ameen, Gus Halper, CCH Pounder, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Johnny Ramey and Michael Potts, with Jeffrey Wright and Audra McDonald.

The film’s executive producers include Higher Ground’s Barack and Michelle Obama along with Mark R. Wright, Alex G. Scott, David Permut, Daniel Sladek and Chris Taaffe. Rustin marked the first narrative feature for Higher Ground; as president, Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his activism. That was in 2013, 25-plus years after Rustin’s death and 10 years before this movie hit theaters.

Bruce Cohen, Higher Ground’s Tonia Davis and Wolfe are producers, marking a reteam of Cohen and Black who made Milk, about the events leading to the assassination of California’s first openly gay politician Harvey Milk. That screenplay earned Black his Original Screenplay Oscar in 2009.

Click below to read the Rustin script.

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