It's kind of amazing there aren't more movies about trailblazing defense attorney Clarence Darrow, considering the number of courtroom dramas out there. A top member of the ACLU, Darrow took on groundbreaking cases such as when he defended thrill killers Leopold and Loeb over what was known then as the "crime of the century", arguing against the use of capital punishment. He also defended substitute teacher John T. Scopes in the "Scopes Monkey Trial", a 1925 case in which Scopes was charged with teaching evolution in a Tennessee classroom. Darrow had an amazing career, and short of a fictionalized account in Inherit the Wind it has gone largely unexplored by Hollywood. Well, that's about to change.
Russell Crowe and David Oyelowo are set to star in Arc of Justice, which will focus on the early days of the NAACP and Darrow's defense of black man Ossian Sweet. Sweet took up an armed defense of his newly-purchased home in Detroit when whites tried to throw him out, not wanting a black family in their all-white neighborhood. Crowe will play Darrow with Oyelowo as Sweet, and directing the film will be Jose Padilha, most recently of the Robocop reboot and Netflix's Narcos series. The film is an adaptation of Kevin Boyle's 2004 book.
Oyelowe and Crowe are no strangers to biopics, both having excelled in them in the past. Oyelowo's next film is God Particle, which is the latest in the Cloverfield series, while Crowe will be seen opposite Tom Cruise in The Mummy. [Variety]
