Sunday Focus: What They're Saying About SELMA

     The L.A. Times review points out most of the film was shot in and around Atlanta. And it says some of the white extras declined parts that would make them part of the hate:

David Lee Holland, a jewelry designer who grew up in Selma but has since moved to New York, returned last summer to be an extra. “It wasn’t that hard to get it. They really needed Caucasians. I was a priest. Which if you know me, is pretty funny."

The review by The BBC calls it the first five star film of the year, and notes the absence of quotes by the main figure:

"....the King family didn't allow the preacher’s actual words to be used in the film." 

The reason is amplified in a review by NPR's Fresh Air:

(King's) family sold the film rights to his speeches to Steven Spielberg for a proposed biopic, and "Selma's" makers had to devise non-actionable paraphrases. But in the reverberant voice of the English-born David Oyelowo, they're thrilling anyway. 

  a piece in The New York Daily News deals with the controversy over the treatment of President Lyndon Johnson:

The movie.....depicts Johnson authorizing FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to smear King and — as King himself suspected — try to drive him to suicide. It is a profoundly ugly moment. But a bevy of historians say it never happened. 

The Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after a Confederate Officer

Resident of the city of Selma have their last chance today to see the movie for free at a temporarily reopened movie theater. The final showing is at 7:00pm tonight.

But the bottom line in Hollywood is literally the bottom line, and SELMA opened "soft", reports Variety:

Paramount Pictures expanded its Oscar frontrunner “Selma” from 22 to 2,179 theaters Friday and it finished second with an estimated $3.7 million. That projects to a soft $11.1 million three-day total, under the expectations of analysts and the studio. By comparison, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” opened to $24.6 million last year, but that was in far more theaters (2,933) and August, a less-competitive slot for awards hopefuls.