Moore Child Kidnapped Maryland

Filmmakers feeling blessed to be in New Orleans making TD Jakes' 'On the ...

So when Neema Barnette signed on to direct "On the Seventh Day" for executive producer Bishop T.D. Jakes, she was given the challenge of honoring and channeling Jakes' brand, one that emphasizes faith, family and life lessons in the black community, while still creating a film with its own identity. Barnette rewrote Jakes' script, and she feels she's struck the right balance for the movie, which wrapped shooting in New Orleans today.

"When Bishop Jakes' people came on the set, I explained to them where we were going with the movie, " said Barnette, who says she is the first black woman to receive a multipicture directorial contract from a major studio. "We're making a grown-up movie. It's not 'Pollyanna.' It's not Disneyland. It's a movie about a real couple with real problems. So they've been pretty hands-off."

"On the Seventh Day, " which began filming here on July 12, tells the story of a couple plunged into a crisis when their 4-year-old daughter is kidnapped. It will be released as part of Jakes' "Woman Thou Art Loosed" series, which also includes a 2004 film and an annual convention.

The filmmakers are striving to communicate the movie's themes -- honesty, forgiveness, facing your demons -- without beating the viewer over the head, she said.

"You can tell family stories that are faith-based without being didactic about it, " said Blair Underwood, the former "L.A. Law" heartthrob, who stars opposite Sharon Neal. "I don't like being preached to unless I'm in church."

Jakes initially planned to set and shoot the film in Prince George's County, Md., And later in Atlanta before deciding in New Orleans. Barnette and director of photography Keith Smith worked to infuse the culture of New Orleans, imagery and mood throughout the film pattern and Genesis, which mimics the seven days of creation.

"I like the pace of this city, the Big Easy, so I wanted to introduce it in photography," said Smith, a native New Orleanians. "It also makes sense for the cooler. Not very bright and warm such as Miami or Los Angeles would be. "

Given its roots in the Christian church, it is perhaps appropriate that Barnette sees production as blessed.

"I swear -- I don't know if I should say this, but I'm going to -- God is really guiding the way for this movie, " she said. "We have done impossible work. The quality of the dailies is outstanding. Blair is phenomenal, Sharon is phenomenal.

"And then we got the pièce de résistance: Pam Grier.

KKK Member Who Almost Got Away With Murder Dies In Prison ...

James Ford Seale, a long-time member of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who very nearly got away with murder, has died. After serving less than four years of three life sentences for the 1964 murders of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, both 19, Seale, 76, died in prison last Tuesday. Continue reading after the jump.

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The Dee/Moore double murder was a classic horror story of the unreconstructed South battling against efforts to end segregation and racial terrorism.While fellow murderer Seale, Charles Marcus Edwards, gave the FBI signed a confession at the time and the two men were arrested, a justice of Mississippi quickly dropped the charges against members of the Klan, no explanation everything. Earlier, a local sheriff told the mother of Moore, who had reported her missing son, Charles Moore has been staying with relatives of the Moores in Louisiana - a lie.

The killings came during that civil rights workers called "Freedom Summer", a period that could have seen the worst racial terrorism in the civil rights movement. When activists vowed to come to Mississippi that summer to undo segregation, White Knights chief Samuel Bowers ordered his members to carry out a series of “counterattacks” against “selected targets.” Six weeks later, White Knights abducted and murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in a case that was later recounted in the movie Mississippi Burning. It was while dredging the Mississippi River near Tallulah for those three civil rights workers that the disfigured bodies of Dee and Moore were found — two more Southern black men in a group of murdered racial martyrs whose entire roster will never be known.

According to Edwards’ confession, he and Seale selected their victims because Moore had just been expelled from college for taking part in a student demonstration and Dee had lived in Chicago — and because they believed a wild tale about the two being part of planned black Muslim uprising. They abducted their victims from a rural stretch of highway in southwest Mississippi and took them into the Homochitto National Forest, where they tied them to trees and beat them unconscious. Then they tied heavy weights to their bodies and threw them in the river. When the bodies were discovered, one had been cut in half and the other decapitated.

The case was reopened in 2005 after Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., reported that Dee and Moore might have been killed in the national forest, meaning the government could bring federal charges. In 2007, Seale was convicted of two counts of kidnapping and one of conspiracy to kidnap. Last year, an appeals court refused to throw out the conviction.

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