Lionsgate and director Jill Soloway are set to deliver ‘Ride’, a biopic about the first American female astronaut, Sally Ride. The film will recreate Ride’s life leading up to her trip into space onboard the Challenger space shuttle in 1983, her first of two trips into space. The screenplay was written by Cassie Pappas, based on a spec script by Krystin Ver Linden.
Soloway created the Golden Globe and Emmy-winning series ‘Transparent’, which recently wrapped its five-season run on Amazon Prime Video. She is currently developing a new series for Amazon, ‘College’, which she is producing with Channing Tatum. She is currently set to direct the comic book barbarian movie ‘Red Sonja’ and another biopic, ‘Mothertrucker, about Joy Mothertrucker, the first and only female ice road trucker, with Julianne Moore set to star.
In addition to being the first American woman in space, Ride was and remains the youngest American to travel into space, at 32 years of age. Ride was also a physicist and after leaving NASA in 1987, became a physics professor at the University of California, San Diego. She passed away due to pancreatic cancer in 2012.
She was posthumously bestowed with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President Barack Obama, and appeared on a US postage stamp in 2018, among many other awards and honors issued during her life and since.
Ride was recently immortalized in plastic, as part of Mattel and Barbie’s ‘Inspiring Women’ series. Ride is the second woman connected to the space program to receive that honor, following mathematician Katherine Johnson, one of the black female mathematicians who were instrumental to the Mercury and Apollo programs, and whose life was chronicled in the 2016 Oscar-nominated film ‘Hidden Figures’. Ride’s Mattel doll has been released concurrently with that of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks. (Both are available in store now.)
It’s not clear where ‘Ride’ will fall on Soloway’s schedule, as she is already attached to the ‘Red Sonja’ and ‘Mothertrucker’. If she makes those first, it will be a few years before we see ‘Ride’. But check back for updates as they arrive!
Source: Deadline
