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Joseph Gordon-Levitt to bring the story of the Ku Klux Klan to the big screen

Joseph Gordon-Levitt to bring the story of the Ku Klux Klan to the big screen

The film "K Troop" will examine the roots of the organization that advocated white supremacy and its conflict with the American army. Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt and screenwriter Robert Schenkkan are working on the development of the feature to be produced by Amazon Studios.

Robert Schenkkan has been called on to write the screenplay for "K Troop." The playwright, television and screen writer has been acclaimed for writing such plays as "The Kentucky Cycle," which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1992, and "All The Way," which earned the Tony Award for best play in 2014. He also took charge of the subsequent TV adaptation of “All The Way” with Bryan Cranston in the role of US President Lyndon Johnson which aired on HBO last May.

One of the writers behind the mini-series “The Pacific,” which was produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks," Robert Schenkkan has recently been in the limelight for his role as a screenwriter on "Hacksaw Ridge," a Mel Gibson-directed war film due for release on November 4.

In "K Troop," the writer will detail the rise of the Klu Klux Klan in the American South of the 1860s. Founded in Tennessee by a group of Confederate officers at the end of the American Civil war, the goal of the Klan was to protest against the abolition of slavery. A few years later, the organization was outlawed, when the US Congress voted in favor of the 1871 Klan Act. During this period, the US army fought the KKK in several Southern States, putting a stop to its criminal persecution of African-Americans.

The producer of the film Joseph Gordon-Levitt will also play the lead role of Lewis Merrill, an army officer in charge of an elite military unit that has been set up to combat the KKK. For the moment, the actor is the only member of the cast to have been chosen for the film which has yet to engage a director.