Nate Parker to adapt memoir about disabled wrestlers, “Carry On”

PanARMENIAN.Net - Walden Media has preemptively acquired screen rights to ESPN producer Lisa Fenn’s inspirational memoir Carry On, and hired Nate Parker to adapt it, Deadline reports.

This is the first big job for Parker since he unveiled at Sundance his slave revolt tale The Birth of A Nation, and saw the film he wrote, directed, produced and starred in sell in a precedent setting $17.5 million deal before it won the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize. The book will be released by HarperCollins in August, and APEX Entertainment’s Mark Ciardi and Identity Films’ Anthony Mastromauro will produce, with APEX’s Campbell McInnes exec producing and overseeing. Walden Media will produce, as well as develop and finance the picture.

The book tells the true journey of Fenn, an Emmy-winning features producer for ESPN, and her 2009 return to her Cleveland hometown to chase a story on two disabled wrestlers who attended an impoverished public high school there. Dartanyon Crockett, who despite being legally blind was the team’s best wrestler, would each and every day physically carry to practice and meets Leroy Sutton, a 170-plus-pound bundle of muscle who lost both his legs in a train accident when he was 11. Fenn formed a bond with the two young men that became so profound that she dedicated the next six years of her life to ensuring their success and well being. Sutton graduated from college, and Crockett won the Bronze Medal in the 2012 ParaOlympic Games.