Names and faces

Singer Gregg Allman has filed a lawsuit to stop movie producers from reviving a film based on his life that was halted after a freight train plowed into crew members shooting on train tracks in southeast Georgia, killing one worker and injuring six others. Attorneys for the Allman Brothers Band singer want a Superior Court judge to order Unclaimed Freight Productions “to cease all efforts to make a motion picture based upon the life of Gregg Allman and/ or his autobiography,” according to the lawsuit filed last week in Savannah. Production on Midnight Rider, a movie based on Allman’s 2012 memoir My Cross to Bear, had just begun in Savannah when crew members were stuck by a train Feb. 20 on a trestle spanning the Altamaha River in nearby Wayne County.Sarah Jones, a 28-year old camera assistant, was killed. Six other members of director Randall Miller’s crew were injured. Producers suspended work on the movie indefinitely the next week. Allman’s attorneys say Midnight Rider producers lost their rights to the singer’s life story when they failed to start principal photography by Feb. 28 and came up $9,000 short of an unspecified sum they had agreed to pay Allman for those film rights. In documents filed with the lawsuit, lawyers for Allman say the producers told them footage shot on the train tracks before the fatal crash satisfied the principal photography deadline.

Thanks to her friends in country music, Miranda Lambert leads the Country Music Television nominations by pairing with her husband, Blake Shelton; her girl group, Pistol Annies; and good friend Keith Urban. She’s up for two individual awards for her video “Automatic,” two for collaborating with the Annies on Shelton’s song “Boys ‘Round Here” and two more for her duet with Urban on “We Were Us.” Luke Bryan and Florida Georgia Line have five nominations each, and Urban and Taylor Swift are tied with four nominations. Lambert will be hard to beat this year, with three videos in the top category of Video of the Year and two in the Collaborative Video of the Year category. Voting began Monday at CMT.com and continues until June 1. The awards show will be held in Nashville, Tenn., on June 4.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 05/06/2014

Upcoming Events