Joe Berlinger Set to Direct Two Documentaries on the Death of Martin Luther King Jr.

Prolific director Joe Berlinger (“Paradise Lost”) is set to direct and produce two documentaries on the death of Martin Luther King. The Emmy Award winning director is working closely with Reverend James Lawson, a civil rights activist and friend of King’s.  It was Lawson who convinced King to go to Memphis to meet with sanitation workers on strike. It was in Memphis that King was shot and killed.

Berlinger will direct the feature film “Slay the Dreamer,” about Lawson and his attempts to get to the truth about who really killed King. The only person who saw the murderer, Grace Walden, denied that James Earl Ray (the person convicted) is the man she saw the day of the assassination.  Ray refused a $100,000 reward offered by the FBI.  She was being held against her will in a mental institution when Lawson found her eight years after King’s death.  Lawson does not believe that Ray killed King.

Besides the feature film, Berlinger will produce a documentary covering the same subjects.

This is not the first time Berlinger has done two back-to-back projects on the same subject. He recently had great success with “Conversations with a Killer: the Ted Bundy Tapes,” and “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.”