King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery To Memphis is a 1970 American documentary film biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., presented in the form of newsreel footage and segments of recordings by Dr. King, framed by celebrity narrators, including Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Ruby Dee, James Earl Jones, Clarence Williams III, Burt Lancaster, Ben Gazzara, Charlton Heston, Harry Belafonte, The movie was produced by Richard Kaplan and Ely Landau.
When first released, it was shown in theaters as a "one-time-only" event on March 24, 1970. The documentary, which ran an unprecedented 3 hours and 5 minutes, had an equally large admission price of $5 (equal to $28 in 2007). All proceeds were donated to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Special Fund. It was later shown on commercial television (unedited and with limited interruption), and finally released onto home video on the Pacific Arts label, where the celebrity narrations (save for Harry Belafonte's introduction) were removed, and ran for 1 hour and 43 minutes.
In 2011, the unedited film was released as a commemorative edition 2-disc DVD set by A Filmed Record, Inc., a non-profit company founded in 2008 by the film's associate producer Richard Kaplan. The set includes the short film Legacy of a Dream.
It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, Features. In 1999, the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
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“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
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