Fast Color is one of those movies that came and went at the US box office, with little promotional push from the studio, but a groundswell of support from those who had seen it and where ready to champion it. It may never have made it to UK shores, but Julia Hart's film is getting a second lease on life via a new TV adaptation in development at Amazon.
The 2018 film, written by Hart and Jordan Horowitz, features three generations of black women, Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), her mother Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) and Ruth’s daughter Lila (Saniyya Sidney) in a world where climate change has left the planet without rain for eight years. All three of the main characters have unusual powers, which means that they prefer to lay low, lest government scientists track them down to conduct tests. Ruth in particular – whose ability feels more of a curse than a blessing, since she creates earthquakes wherever she goes – is always on the run. But she returns home, and events spiral from there.
Like the movie, the show will follow Ruth's return home as the women reconnect and begin to realise that one of them could save the world. Viola Davis and Julius Tennon's JuVee Productions are backing Hart and Horowitz in the development, with the filmmaking duo writing the pilot and Hart once more directing. "Since the day we premiered at SXSW, there has been an incredible outpouring of grassroots support for this film," Hart tells Deadline. "We couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to continue living in this world, with these women, and can’t imagine better partners than Viola and Julius and Mickey and Pete and everyone at Amazon."
With luck, it means more people might actually see the story, or even seek out the movie.