Revered veteran actor Wendell Pierce has come on board to produce a film adaptation of author Albert French’s 1995 debut novel, titled "Billy," which, narrated by an anonymous observer, tells the harrowing and still relevant tale of 10-year-old Billy Lee Turner, a black boy who is convicted of, and executed for murdering a white girl in Banes County, Mississippi in 1937. From Amazon's summary of the novel: "Albert French evokes with cinematic vividness the picking fields and town streets; the heat, the dust, the unrelenting sun, the poverty of 1930s Mississippi. High-spirited Billy; his mysterious and passionate mother, Cinder; his friend, Gumpy; and...