Deadline is reporting that Jay Roach (Trumbo, Game Change) has signed on to direct 67 Shots, a drama exploring the fatal 1970 shootings at Kent State University, which is based upon Howard Means’ book 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence.
According to the site, the film will chronicle “the buildup that led to the horrific event: the May 4, 1970 shooting of student protesters on the Kent State campus, where 29 guardsmen from the Ohio National Guard fired 67 shots into a crowd of students protesting the war in Vietnam. They killed four students and injured nine others.”
“It is a cautionary tale,”said Roach. “Kent State was a big event for me, and I remember arguing with my dad about it when I was about 13. There was a prevailing movement in the country — they measured it with polls — where the vast majority of Americans blamed the students for what happened. Maybe 60% in Gallup-type polls felt the students brought it on themselves. We have footage of people on the streets saying, ‘I wish they’d shot them all,’ ‘I wish they had machine guns…’ More people are marching in the streets now than maybe at any time since the 1970s, and it made me feel this was a story worth revisiting, what could lead to an overreaction like this one, where military soldiers with bayonets could march onto a college campus with live ammunition in the chambers of their M-1 rifles. What kind of chemistry would have to be in place for that to happen back then, and how does that relate to what’s going on now?”
Roach is also set to produce the project alongside Tina Fey, Jeff Richmond and Eric Gurian of Little Stranger, Michelle Graham of Everyman Pictures and Rawat and Monica Levinson from ShivHans Pictures.
