James Brown biopic set to grace our screens soon

James Brown - the "Godfather of Soul" - performs her in Prague in 2004

According to Tate Taylor, the director behind the hit film The Help, filming on a biopic on the story of James Brown will start soon.

Taylor, speaking at the Mississippi Coliseum on the state fairgrounds in Jackson, where some scenes for the film will be shot, said he would be directing the film and that the whole thing would be filmed in his home state.

"Every frame will be shot in Mississippi. We’re even doing Paris, France, in Mississippi ... Vietnam, as well, in Mississippi," he said.

Taylor added that he could know within the next week who will play Brown although he admitted they were "tough shoes to fill" and hinted that he would probably cast a relatively unknown actor.

Co-producers for the movie are Mick Jagger and Brian Grazer. "James Brown, really, was the first real dancer that broke the ground of how people move,” Taylor said. “And Mick Jagger has complimented that and tipped his hat to that forever.”

James Brown was born in South Carolina and grew up in Georgia. The film will begin when Brown was about 5 years old and will extend to about 1993. Although Brown performed a concert at the Mississippi Coliseum in February 1969, it is not clear whether that concert will be depicted in the movie. Taylor said the coliseum’s interior will stand in for Boston Gardens, where Brown played a concert and calmed an audience after the Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968; and downtown Jackson will stand in for downtown Cincinnati, home of King Records, the label that launched Brown. Brown died in 2006 and this is the first biographic feature about his life.

Associated Press