‘Voodoo Macbeth’ Becomes First USC Originals Pic To Secure Theatrical Release As Lightyear Entertainment Picks Up Rights

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: USC Originals has scored its first theatrical release, in association with Warner Bros., following Lightyear Entertainment’s acquisition of its film, Voodoo Macbeth.

The company behind the Oscar-nominated Australian feature Tanna has slated the pic for release across the U.S. and Canada in October.Based on a true story, Voodoo Macbeth follows a young Orson Welles (Jewell Wilson Bridges) and a group of committed artists as they set out to create what is now considered a landmark event in African-American theater history—the Negro Theatre Unit’s revolutionary 1936 production of Macbeth.With FDR’s New Deal providing funding for the Federal Theatre Project, director Rose McClendon (Inger Tudor) convinces co-director John Houseman (Daniel Kuhlman) to help her bring Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the Harlem community at the Lafayette Theater — with an all-Black cast.

Well before Citizen Kane and War of the Worlds, they choose for their groundbreaking production a gifted but untested 20-year-old Welles, whose reimagined Haitian vision for the Scottish play is as daring and fresh as the cast and crew themselves, exchanging the witchcraft of the original for Caribbean voodoo.The production was highly controversial, provoking heated protests from Harlemites who considered it exploitative, and by politicians who thought it subversive.

Still, it debuted to packed audiences and was wildly successful, playing the Lafayette Theater for 10 weeks and then touring across America.Overseen by USC professor and veteran producer John Watson (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Backdraft), Voodoo Macbeth was made in unusual fashion for a narrative feature, boasting 10 directors including Dagmawi Abebe, Victor Alonso-Berbel, Hannah Bang,