Julia Roberts is set to star in and produce “ADX,” about a real-life attorney’s fight to improve conditions at America’s only supermax prison.
The HBO Films project is based on the NY Times article “Inside America’s Toughest Federal Prison.” Based in Colorado, the ADX facility has been described by one of its former wardens as “a clean version of hell.” It is the country’s highest-security prison and many of its inmates serve multiple life sentences, which means prisoners have little practical reason not to, say, kill a guard or a fellow convict.
Roberts’ character is being compared to Erin Brockovich, the role that garnered the actress an Oscar win. Roberts will play a woman based on lawyer Deborah Golden, whose discovery of ADX prisoners being denied legal due process and mental-health considerations led to the biggest lawsuit ever filed against the Bureau of Prisons.
Here is The Tracking Board’s description of the film:
“The Oscar-winner will play an attorney who receives a letter from an inmate at the remote maximum security prison speaking of the injustices going on in the prison. She partners with another attorney to take on the B.O.P. and to expose the injustices at the ADX. The premise, with its David-vs-Goliath set-up and themes of exposing the truth against all odds, has shades of Roberts’s iconic ‘Erin Brockovich’ and this year’s Best Picture nominee ‘Spotlight.’”
Roberts will next be seen in the Jodie Foster-directed “Money Monster.”
[via Tracking Board]
