The Hollywood production company behind recent indie hit 99 Homes and Eden is making a biopic of American playwright Tennessee Williams, reports Deadline.
Broad Green Pictures has picked up screen rights to the 2014 biography Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by former New Yorker theatre critic John Lahr, and will now look for a screenwriter to develop the project. The volume was the Guardian’s book of the week in October 2014, with reviewer Sarah Churchwell praising a “compulsively readable, thoroughly researched” biography, while criticising Lahr’s propensity for “gaps and repetitions”.
Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh focuses largely on the playwright’s later years, after 1944, when he dramatically entered the public consciousness via the semi-autobiographical play The Glass Menagerie. Lahr’s book won a National Book Critics Circle award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Lamda award for best gay biography and the Sheridan Morley prize for theatre biography.
Williams’s best known plays include A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). The biopic ought to have plenty of Hollywood glamour to work with: Lahr’s book details his fruitful working partnership with A Streetcar Named Desire director Elia Kazan and includes episodes with stars such as Marlon Brando, Bette Davis and Tallulah Bankhead.
Any adaptation would struggle, however, to avoid the darker episodes in Williams’ life. The playwright died alone in a New York hotel room in 1983, with a dependence on drugs and alcohol listed as a contributing factor in his death. He had not had a major Broadway hit since 1962, with The Night of the Iguana.
The film may also cover Williams’s relationship with his long-term partner Frank Merlo. Merlo’s death, in 1963, is said to have contributed to Williams’s subsequent depression.
His plays A Cavalier for Milady, Suddenly Last Summer, The Night of the Iguana and The Glass Menagerie were to some degree inspired by his mother’s decision to have his sister, Rose, who was schizophrenic, lobotomised.
Broad Green Pictures, founded in 2014, has found success with a number of recent film projects, including 99 Homes and Eden. The company co-produced Terrence Malick’s Berlin film festival debutant Knight of Cups. The production company is also overseeing another forthcoming project by Malick, which will star Ryan Gosling, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara and Christian Bale.
