She went to ECU - she's definitely spent some time around southern accents. One might even go further, if one were willing to speak ill of Greenville in front of a bunch of northeasterners. Which one is not.
I had no idea she went to ECU. Both my parents got their Master's in Music from ECU. I suppose perhaps she just knows the type all too well. I haven't spent much time in South Carolina personally, my area of expertise mostly lies in the triangle of Chattanooga, Atlanta and Birmingham. Which isn't far from where the movie's events took place.
What gets me isn't even what events the movie is based on, it's how they chose to interpret it. They turned it from a story of a good kid who took advantage of his lucky break to work hard and accomplish something with his life... to what looks like a story of a woman who finds one of "the good ones" and rescues him from "the bad ones" by bringing him into white society. Were the story based 40 years ago, her story would be more interesting, but it still wouldn't excuse blowing right past the circumstances of his life.
Perhaps it's just that trailer and the movie actually presents Big Mike the human being.