Jenny Lumet is paying tribute to a trailblazer — and family member — with her latest project. The “Star Trek: Discovery” scribe has a limited series about actress, singer, dancer, and civil rights activist Lena Horne in the works at Showtime. Lumet is the granddaughter of the late icon.
According to Variety, the series is currently titled “Blackbird: Lena Horne and America,” “named for Horne’s favorite poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.'” Lumet is signed on to co-write the first few eps of the series with frequent collaborator Alex Kurtzman. Both are exec producing.
Spanning 60 years of Horne’s life, “from dancing at the Cotton Club when she was 16, through World War II and stardom in the MGM years, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, and her triumphant return to Broadway,” “Blackbird: Lena Horne and America” will also “delve into her relationships with luminaries like Paul Robeson, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Joe Louis, Billie Holiday, Hattie McDaniel, Ava Gardner, and Orson Welles,” the source details.
“Bringing my grandmother’s story to the screen required a multi-generational effort,” said Lumet. “Grandma passed her stories to my mother, who now passes them to me, so I may pass them to the children of our family. Lena’s story is so intimate and at the same time, it’s the story of America – America at its most honest, most musical, most tragic, and most joyous. It’s crucial now. Especially now,” she emphasized. “She was the love of my life.”
A four-time Grammy winner, Horne’s albums included “An Evening with Lena Horne” and “Lena Horne at the Sands.” “Cabin in the Sky,” “The Wiz,” and “Ziegfeld Follies” were among her film credits. She starred in “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” a one woman Broadway show.
“She was also a well-known civil rights activist, who famously refused to play for segregated audiences during her time entertaining troops with the USO during World War II,” Variety notes. “She also attended the March on Washington in 1963 and advocated on behalf of numerous organizations dedicated [to] helping Black people in America.”
“My identity is very clear to me now. I am a Black woman. I’m free,” Horne said at the age of 80. “I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”
Horne died in 2010 at the age of 92.
Lumet penned the screenplay for 2008 Anne Hathaway-starrer “Rachel Getting Married.” She recently wrote for “Star Trek: Discovery,” and has a number of projects in the pipeline. She co-created “Clarice,” a “Silence of the Lambs” spinoff in the works at CBS, and will serve as showrunner on “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” a sci-fi series based on the novel and film of the same name that’s in development at CBS All Access.
Check out a video of Lumet reminiscing about Horne in an interview with The Root below.
