Tobey Maguire has signed on to star in new Universal’s “The Cruisaders.”
Gary Ross will be directing the drama about the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case.
Maguire would play Jack Greenberg, who, as an idealistic lawyer fresh out of law school, joined with NAACP Legal Defense Fund head and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to win a Supreme Court case that ruled segregation in American schools illegal.
The project, based on Greenberg’s memoirs “Crusaders in the Courts,” was originally developed by Cooper at New Line. That studio let it go after New Line was absorbed by Warner Bros.Ross will next direct Universal drama “The Free State of Jones,” about rebellion in Mississippi during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
