Directors & Executive Music Producer Announced for Upcoming Event Series ROOTS

A+E Networks announces two directors and the executive music producer of its four-night, eight-hour scripted event series ROOTS. Multi-award winning Phillip Noyce (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, Salt) and Emmy® Award winner Thomas Carter (Coach Carter, Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story) are set to helm nights one and three respectively. Directors for nights two and four are to be announced.

Additionally, Questlove, from the Grammy Award winning band The Roots, is set as the executive music producer. For ROOTS, he will create the authentic African sound and themes for the characters as well as produce the overall sound as the music progresses each night.

ROOTS is a historical portrait of American slavery recounting the journey of one family's will to survive, endure and ultimately carry on their legacy despite enormous hardship and inhumanity. Spanning multiple generations, the lineage begins with young Kunta Kinte who is captured in his homeland in The Gambia and transported in brutal conditions to colonial America where he's sold into slavery. Throughout the series, the family continues to face adversity while bearing witness and contributing to notable events in U.S. history - including the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, slave uprisings and eventual emancipation. The story of Kunta Kinte and the women and men who came after him echoes through the history of millions of Americans of African descent, and reveals powerful truths about the universal resilience of the human spirit.

ROOTS is an A+E Studios production in association with Marc Toberoff and The Wolper Organization, the company that produced the original ROOTS. Will Packer, Marc Toberoff, Mark Wolper, Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal serve as executive producers. LeVar Burton and Korin Huggins are co-executive producers. Lawrence Konner, Mark Rosenthal, Alison McDonald, and Charles Murray are writing. Dirk Hoogstra, Arturo Interian and Michael Stiller serve as Executives in Charge of Production for HISTORY. ROOTS is distributed internationally by A+E Networks under the A+E Studios International banner.

About HISTORY®

HISTORY®, now reaching more than 96 million homes, is the leading destination for award-winning original series and specials that connect viewers with history in an informative, immersive and entertaining manner across all platforms. The network's all-original programming slate, including scripted event programming, features a roster of hit series including American Pickers®, American Restoration™, Ax Men™, Counting Cars™, Pawn Stars® and Swamp People® as well as HISTORY®'s first scripted series Vikings, and epic miniseries and special programming such as The Bible, The Men Who Built America, Houdini, SONS OF LIBERTY and the Emmy® Award-winning Hatfields & McCoys, Gettysburg, Vietnam in HD, America The Story of Us® and 102 Minutes That Changed America. The HISTORY® website is the leading online resource for all things history, and in 2011, the United States Library of Congress selected HISTORY®'s Civil War 150 site for inclusion in the historic collection of Internet materials related to the American Civil War sesquicentennial. www.history.com.