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EXCLUSIVE: Spike Lee is developing Liberty, a comedic military drama based on a pitch from writers Rebecca Murga and Jalysa Conway, which he’ll produce with an eye to direct, sources tell Deadline.
Said to be in the vein of The Last Detail, Hal Ashby’s Oscar-nominated 1973 Navy dramedy starring Jack Nicholson, Otis Young and Randy Quaid, Liberty follows a group of military cadets on one crazy night in New York City during Fleet Week. This is the second military-themed project Lee has developed with Murga and Conway — a pair of military veterans who will write the script — on the heels of a coming-of-age ROTC drama series for Amazon, on which we were first to report in 2022.
Lee and Steven Jackson will produce for their 40 Acres And A Mule Filmworks, alongside Underground, which reps the writers.
A U.S. Army vet who completed two tours in Afghanistan, Murga has been a writer on the last two seasons of ABC’s Will Trent and has also written on Apple TV+’s sports drama Swagger. Currently, she’s also developing Devil’s Ranch, a one-hour military procedural for ABC and 20th, which Underground will produce. The drama, for which Heidi Cole McAdams is serving as showrunner, follows a group of ex-military personnel who operate a ranch on the Texas-Mexico border by day and conduct various missions across the globe by night.
A retired Flight Commander in Cyber Warfare for the U.S. Air Force, Conway was most recently a Supervising Producer on 9-1-1: Lone Star and worked on Power Book IV: Force as an Executive Story Editor. She was also a writer and Story Editor on Seasons 14 through 16 of Grey’s Anatomy.
One of the most celebrated directors of his generation, whose feature career spans over 30 years, Lee is coming off of Highest 2 Lowest, a crime thriller based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low, which stars Denzel Washington, Ilfenesh Hadera, Jeffrey Wright, Ice Spice, and A$AP Rocky. Not yet dated, the film is slated to hit theaters via A24 before debuting on Apple TV+. Prior to that, Lee directed the Vietnam drama Da 5 Bloods for Netflix, as well as Focus Features’ BlacKkKlansman, which earned him an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and a DGA Award nomination, among other accolades. Other projects in recent years have included the HBO miniseries NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½ and the Emmy-winning concert film David Byrne’s American Utopia.
Lee is repped by Gersh and Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks; Murga by Underground and Gersh; and Conway by Underground and Granderson Des Rochers.
