EXCLUSIVE: Last seen on horseback in a period film in the 1993 film Posse, Mario Van Peebles is set to direct and star in Outlaw Posse. He wrote the script. Peebles has teamed with Emmy-winning filmmaker Kip Konwiser and Christopher Miller’s The Money Pool on the cowboy drama. The film is in preproduction and Van Peebles has begun casting leads for early next year, with Konwiser and Miller producing.
Outlaw Posse is set against the rolling hills and the lawless towns of the American wild west in the late 1800s. Van Peebles plays Chief, leader of a posse of black cowboys in search of truth & justice.
Van Peebles aims to uphold the spirit of the earlier film, in which his character led a group of black infantrymen after the Spanish-American War to find the men who lynched his father.
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“Folks have been after me to do another Baadasssss multi-cultural Western for years and the time is now,” says Van Peebles, son of Melvin Van Peebles, writer/director/star of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. “This time we have badass and tough women riding tall in the posse alongside homages to notable real-life personages of the wild west. This is a posse of outlaws because “when the laws were unjust, sometimes the just were the outlaws. We are living in our version of the wild west, and these films represent the heroes who fight for our daily survival as individuals.”
Said Money Pool co-founders Konwiser & Miller: “At a time when African American cinema can expand its perspective, the barn doors are off the hinges for the most compelling filmmakers. Van Peebles is back in the saddle with another classic, and Outlaw Posse is exactly the project for which the Money Pool was created!”
The Money Pool was founded two years ago to produce content and provide equity, bridge, gap, mezzanine and tax credit lending to structured feature films, television, and new media. It has completed four films so far.
Van Peebles is repped by Luber Roklin Entertainment.
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