Fifteen years after Laurence Fishburne starred as Walter Mosley‘s Socrates Fortlow in the HBO movie Always Outnumbered written by Mosley and directed by Michael Apted, the actor-producer is revisiting the character for HBO, this time on the series side. The pay cable network is developing The Right Mistake, a drama series from Fishburne’s Cinema Gypsy Prods and Fox Television Studios. It is based on the series of novels by Mosley featuring Fortlow: an ex-convict who seeks redemption — while battling inner demons and external forces — after serving 27 years in prison. The books include Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, Walkin’ The Dog and The Right Mistake. Mosley and Patrick Charles are co-writing the series adaptation, with Fishburne attached to star. He is executive producing with Cinema Gypsy’s Helen Sugland and Tom Russo as well as Mosley and his partner, Diane Houslin. Charles is co-executive producing. The Right Mistake stems from the Cinema Gypsy’s first-look cable deal with FtvS. On the broadcast side, Cinema Gypsy has Black-ish, a single-camera comedy starring Anthony Anderson and written by Kenya Barris in development at ABC. The Matrix and CSI alum Fishburne, repped by Paradigm, Landmark Artist Management and Del, Shaw, also has a major recurring role on NBC’s Hannibal.
When he was a teenage author, Walter Mosley learned that African-American men like himself faced different laws and rights than his peers. In the wake of the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, he says nothing has changed—and asks what we’re going to do about it.
I remember when I was 17 years old, in 1969; three of my friends dropped by in one of their cars and asked me if I wanted to go out with them to the beach or the woods, I forget which. I told my father that I was going and he came out to see my friends. He knew them all and liked them. I went to high school with two of them.
“I’ll see you later,” I said to my dad.
“OK, Walter, but let me tell you something first. If the police stop you guys, your friends will be going home and you will go to jail.”
These particular friends were young, long-haired white kids.
My father was telling me, teaching me that my rights and those of my friends were not the same in mid-century America. People were watching me, suspecting me, fearing and hating me. Not all people. Not all white people. But there was an active shooting range on the streets of every big city in the country, and there was an indelible target on every black man’s chest and head.
Living in the land of the free doesn’t make you free—that’s what my father taught me.
On Friday, May 31 at 4:00pm EDT, The New York Times Bestselling author Walter Mosley talks about his book LITTLE GREEN, with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor, The Atlantic. Watch the conversation live, here.
When last we saw Walter Mosley’s detective Easy Rawlins, he had just lost control of a car he was driving on the Pacific Coast Highway north of Malibu. This was in the closing pages of the 11th (and apparently final) Rawlins book, “Blonde Faith,” published in 2007. “The back of my car hit something hard,” Easy tells us, “a boulder no doubt. Something clenched down on my left foot and pain lanced up my leg. I ignored this, though, realizing that in a few seconds, I’d be dead.”
And yet, six years later, Easy is back, narrating a new novel, “Little Green” (Doubleday: 292 pp., $25.95), that picks up where “Blonde Faith” left off. He is, if not entirely alive, then at least present, navigating a 1967 Los Angeles he barely recognizes in the wake of both the Watts riots and the Summer of Love.
“It was great,” Mosley enthuses, “because for all intents and purposes, Easy was dead. And when he came back to consciousness, he felt dead. … Most of my novels are about redemption. But ‘Little Green’ is about resurrection. And so, I naturally followed it, from having him wake up dead to, at the end of the book, actually being alive.” Read the rest of this entry »
Written by Walter Mosley Directed by Daniel Bryant Featuring Anthony Irons
Feb 25, 2013 – Mar 24, 2013
For tickets:
Congo Square Theatre Company
2936 North Southport Avenue
Chicago, IL 60657
773.296.1108
In the blink of an eye, Tempest is struck by the bullet of a police gun and finds himself at the pearly gates facing St. Peter and his judgment. Refusing to accept his eternal condition, he’s stripped of his identity and given a new body and a chance to change his fate. Alive, Tempest was no angel, but he was far from evil. The Accounting Angel, Joshua, is out to prove the scales tip toward the latter. Adapted from his book, Tempest Tales, and inspired by Langston Hughes’ colorful character, Jesse B. Semple, Walter Mosley takes us on a hip trip—an ethereal excursion into the metaphysical conundrum between right and wrong, good and evil. Which will you choose?
Enjoy a sneak peek from a staged reading of The Fall of Heaven:
Camera Q&A: Walter Mosley on adapting his novels for the screen, by Christian Niedan
Walter Mosley is a New York City-based author, whose 37+ book literary career goes back to 1990′s Devil in a Blue Dress. That novel kicked off a series revolving around detective Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins — a Black resident of the Watts section of Los Angeles, whose continuing story begins in 1948, and (with the May 2013 release of his 12th story,Little Green) has progressed to 1967. Mosley also created the character of ex-convict Socrates Fortlow, the modern-day protagonist of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, and two other novels. Both Rawlins and Fortlow were adapted for the screen in the 1990s. Denzel Washington portrayed Rawlins in 1995′s Devil in a Blue Dress, directed by Carl Franklin. Laurence Fishburne portrayed Fortlow in 1998′s Always Outnumbered, directed by Michael Apted for HBO. During production Mosley met producer Diane Houslin, and in 2012 they partnered to launch a new production company: Best of Brooklyn Filmhouse. Other Mosley creations include Fearless Jones, portrayed by Bill Nunn in the final episode of Showtime’s anthology series, Fallen Angels. He has also authored several science-fiction stories — the latest being The Gift of Fire andOn the Head of a Pin, which were released together by Tor Hardcover in May, 2012. Camera In The Sun interviewed Mosley in the summer of 2012, as he was editing Little Green, and discussed how his books have been adapted for the screen — including past and future versions of Easy Rawlins.
The dates have been announced for the Little Green National Author tour, May-June 2013 in the following cities; Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, Scottsdale, St. Louis, Austin, Houston, Philadelphia, Raleigh, Brooklyn, New York, Washington DC.
Browse the Events Calendar(to the right) or click “Appearances” to see a list of readings in your area.
Walter Mosley. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, $9.99 e-book (279p) ISBN 978-0-345-80444-0
Many of Mosley’s heroes are men who are or have been brutal and are certainly still dangerous—men like Fearless Jones, Leonid McGill, Easy Rawlins, and Easy’s friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander—and all have their redeeming qualities. Xavier “Ecks” Rule may be the worst, having “beaten, raped, and murdered my brothers and sisters,” until he meets Father Frank, whose Seabreeze City, Calif., congregation consists of 96 similarly lost souls. Father Frank gives Ecks a mission to aid Benol Richards, who as a young woman 23 years earlier helped her lover, Brayton Starmon, kidnap and sell three babies. Now Benol wants to make amends, and Ecks reluctantly agrees to help. Sordid tales mingle with trials, redemptions, and philosophy grounded in gritty experiences as Ecks follows cold clues into hot action. Ecks’s world is populated with some of Mosley’s most colorful and memorable characters, from Father Frank, who never invokes God, to the edgy parishioners who make up his flock. No Mosley fan should risk missing this scintillating novel. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis Agency. (Dec.)
Walter Mosley is a New York City-based author, whose 37+ book literary career goes back to 1990′s 
Parishioner
Many of Mosley’s heroes are men who are or have been brutal and are certainly still dangerous—men like Fearless Jones, Leonid McGill, Easy Rawlins, and Easy’s friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander—and all have their redeeming qualities. Xavier “Ecks” Rule may be the worst, having “beaten, raped, and murdered my brothers and sisters,” until he meets Father Frank, whose Seabreeze City, Calif., congregation consists of 96 similarly lost souls. Father Frank gives Ecks a mission to aid Benol Richards, who as a young woman 23 years earlier helped her lover, Brayton Starmon, kidnap and sell three babies. Now Benol wants to make amends, and Ecks reluctantly agrees to help. Sordid tales mingle with trials, redemptions, and philosophy grounded in gritty experiences as Ecks follows cold clues into hot action. Ecks’s world is populated with some of Mosley’s most colorful and memorable characters, from Father Frank, who never invokes God, to the edgy parishioners who make up his flock. No Mosley fan should risk missing this scintillating novel. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis Agency. (Dec.)
