agingrebel.com
Get ready to have more Kurt Sutter style biker authenticity shoved down your throat.
Sutter and FX Networks announced last week that the writer and the soulless corporation will collaborate on a Sons of Anarchy spinoff to be titled Mayans MC. Throughout the run of the first show, viewers were encouraged to believe that Sons of Anarchy was an expose of life in the Hells Angels. Viewers were also supposed to understand that the Mayans was a stand-in for the Mongols MC. Now the Mayans/Mongols are getting their own show.
“In the spirit of Sons of Anarchy, Mayans MC will be a dark, visceral family drama that takes a new look at the most American of icons, the 1% outlaw, this time reflected through a Latino lens,” is how FX describes the new business venture.
Sutter told The Hollywood Reporter that the new show’s “tone, pace, storytelling will be unique.” Sons of Anarchy was set in Northern California. THR reports that Mayans MC will be set some place else.
Sutter’s collaborator on the show will be filmmaker, musician and reputed badass Elgin James.
Elgin James
As the web magazine Deadline Hollywood put it, “James’ bio reads like the story of a SOA character.” According to various biographies, James is of “mixed race” and was raised by pacifist, “civil rights activists” on a farm. James was brutally beaten by those pacifists who also smoked marijuana. He told The New Yorker, “I’d grown up terrified of the world. Nights spent curled in a ball trying to disappear in the crack between my bed and the wall while my mother screamed for my father to stop. The worst thing about a 7-year-old being punched by a grown man is that you become emotionally frozen at that age.”James became a vegetarian when he was eleven and during his adolescence he was inspired by civil rights attorneys William Kunstler and Morris Dees. He attended Antioch College in Ohio when he was 17 but was beaten there too in some sort of “gang fight.” He apparently dropped out and began to read and identify with Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton. Eventually, he drifted to Boston and founded a group called “Fuck Shit Up” which has now been rechristened “Friends Stand United.” FSU members shared an interest in punk music and developed a reputation for rat packing random victims. “What we lacked in numbers we made up for in viciousness,” James said. According to an article by Debbie Catalano in Soundcheck Magazine, “The founding core of FSU eventually splintered, with a large section moving on to motorcycle gangs like the Outlaws and later the Mongols.”
James’ Career
James made a couple of films about FSU titled Boston Beatdown and Boston Beat Down II, then a short film titled Goodnight Moon and a feature titled Little Birds in 2009, He entered the last film at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. It won and Hollywood beat a path to his door. That year he was arrested for the attempted extortion of a musician named Tony Lovato and eventually did a year in prison. The conviction seemed to have enhanced James charisma and tough guy credibility..“I wanted to find a strong, unique Latino voice. Because I didn’t think a white guy from Jersey should be writing about Latin culture and traditions. Elgin is that voice,” said Sutter.
Both Sutter and James are represented by the William Morris Endeavor talent agency.
No casting decisions have yet been announced.