Sayles Writing Thorpe Biopic
Thursday, April 29, 2004 9:56 AM EDT
John Sayles will write "Carlisle School", a feature about Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe, for Walden Media.
The film will chronicle the early years of Thorpe's collegiate sports career during his years at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a boarding school in Pennsylvania that housed Native Americans from childhood through college. The project will also detail the college's winning football seasons in 1911 and 1912 under the direction of legendary Coach "Pop" Warner and Thorpe's pentathlon and decathlon victories at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, after which Sweden's King Gustav V dubbed him the world's greatest athlete.
Thorpe was later stripped of the medals because he'd played semi-pro baseball. The International Olympic Committee restored the medals posthumously in 1982.
Thorpe's life was previously the subject of the Warner Bros. movie "Jim Thorpe: All American", which starred Burt Lancaster, made two years before Thorpe's death in 1953.
