Today in “Good news for exceptionally talented novelists,” HBO has optioned Middlesex (the 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winner for fiction by Jeffrey Eugenides) and is developing it into a one-hour series.
Actor-producer Rita Wilson [wife of Tom Hanks] is executive producing, along with the project’s writer Donald Margulies.
The potential drama series follows the life of Calliope Stephanides and the epic family history that may hold the answer to her complicated sexual identity ["she" later becomes "Cal"].
Margulies, known best as a playwright, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his play Dinner With Friends, which was made into an HBO telefilm.
Hmmm… I’m skeptical but hopeful. Middlesex is a gigantic beast of a novel, covering a family history that spans three generations and includes an incestual love story, emigration from Greece to America, white flight in urban Detroit, and a transgender protagonist who is raised as a girl but later becomes a man. Cal’s not exactly the sort of central character I’d want to try to make mainstream audiences identify with — it’s one thing to make him/her sympathetic in prose, but another thing entirely for viewers to accept the character visually.
But then, I’m also not a Pulitzer Prize-playwright, so maybe I should just shut my naysaying yap and see what happens. I guess I can wait to see who they cast before I take a dump on this.
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For what it’s worth, Jeffrey Eugenides also wrote The Virgin Suicides, which worked pretty well as a movie (I thought). I probably won’t watch this, though.
/lives a few blocks south of Sunset Blvd, sees more than enough transgenders when driving to Trader Joe’s.
I saw the story of a little boy who became a woman end a Staples Center today, so this is very topical.
Rita Wilson also produced My Big Fat Greek Wedding, so I’m sure this will be just as nuanced.
“Rumor? Rumor Willis? Your agent is on line one. Something about playing the lead on a new HBO show or something…”
Wow, great call Pretzelman. She’s perfect for the part.
Chastity/Chaz Bono can be her stand-in.
My girlfriend is making me read this book (she swears by it up and down). I think it’s bloody dreadful…overly verbose and prone to hyperbole. I’d rather be reading anything by Dave Eggers.
This sounds like retarded name dropping, which it is, but it’s funny none the less. I was at a premiere party at the Chateau Marmont a couple years ago and Rita Wilson mistook me for someone – a friend’s husband. She was INCREDIBLY drunk. She grabbed me by the shoulders and started shaking me around while trying to introduce me to someone as this other person. When I finally convinced her I wasn’t who she thought I was she yelled “Well FUCK YOU then!” and slammed me into a wall. As I was collecting myself, someone helped me up and said “Sorry, she gets like that when she’s drunk…want to go get a drink?” And that was Tom Hanks. ANd we proceeded to do shots of whiskey at the bar until I couldn’t walk straight. And it was also my birthday. LONG STORY SHORT, Rita Wilson is a horrible drunk and Tom Hanks is pretty rad. Oh, And HBO usually makes pretty good TV shows.
That is an AWESOME story.