Nominated for two Oscars in 2010 for the drama “Precious“, the director Lee Daniels is preparing to launch the thriller “The Paperboy” at the end of 2012, the next project which attracted his attention was the biographical drama “The Butler“, which is based on the article “A Butler Well Served by This Election”, published by the journalist Wil Haygood in 2008 in the newspaper Washington Post.
The protagonist of this extraordinary life story is Eugene Allen, a black man originally from Virginia, who was not the right to use the public restrooms in his native state when he was a child and teenager, but came to be employed as a butler to White House and remained to this job for 34 years, between 1952 to 1986, under the regimes of Presidents Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
Eugene Allen has witnessed of some watershed events from U.S. history like the brothers Kennedy assassination, the activist Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War, was amazed and impressed by the election of Barack Obama and saddened by the fact that his wife Helene , with whom he shared the joys and sorrows for 65 years, has not lived to see the first black president in the history of the country, dying at the end of 2008, with only a few hours before election day.
According to Empire Online, the roles for the butler Eugene Allen and his wife Helene, Lee Daniels is talking with David Oyelowo (“The Help”, “Red Tails”, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”) and Oprah Winfrey (“The Color Purple” “Beloved”), the first of them working on the thriller “The Paperboy” and the second has an Oscar nomination, although the audience knows more as a businesswoman, moderating the talk show or patron of a TV station.
