https://www.indiewire.com/2019/09/will-smith-netflix-the-council-1202176191/Will Smith Returns to Netflix to Star as Crime Boss Nicky Barnes in ‘The Council’
The film will follow Barnes, who led a New York City crime syndicate that ruled Harlem in the '70s and '80s.Will Smith has signed on to star in and produce Netflix’s upcoming film “The Council,” the fact-based story of of Nicky Barnes, who led a New York City crime syndicate that ruled Harlem in the ’70s and ’80s. While Barnes has been a secondary character in films before, the new film will be the first to focus squarely on the man and his criminal enterprise. The screenplay was written by journalist and veteran of the biopic genre Peter Landesman. He wrote and directed 2015’s “Concussion,” which stars Smith as a doctor who fights against the NFL over his research on traumatic brain injury, the 2013 post-Kennedy-assassination tale “Parkland,” and Watergate drama “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House.”
Per the film’s official synopsis, “‘The Council’ is the never-before told story of a crime syndicate consisting of seven African-American men who ruled Harlem in the 1970s and early 80s. No ordinary crime syndicate — the men dreamed of a self-sufficient and self-policing African American city-state, funded by revolutionizing the drug game. The movie centers on the Shakespearean court intrigue between The Council’s king, Nicky Barnes, dubbed ‘Mr. Untouchable’ by the New York Times, and all the different members as one unlikely rising protégé emerges.”
The studio also shares that, “Barnes, whose death was recently made known, was an American crime boss, active in New York City during the 1970s who led an international drug trafficking ring, in partnership with the Italian-American Mafia, until his arrest in 1978. Barnes was sentenced to life imprisonment, eventually becoming a federal informant.”
