LOS ANGELES, Feb 19: Actor Brad Pitt is set to co-produce an adaptation of “He Wanted the Moon”, a memoir by Mimi Baird and Eve Claxton.
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tony Kushner has been hired to is adapt the title as a feature film, said The Hollywood Reporter.
Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment and Cross Creek Pictures are teaming up for the movie.
Kushner’s credits include the Steven Spielberg movies “Lincoln” and “Munich”.
The book’s complete title is “He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr Perry Baird and His Daughter’s Quest to Know Him.”
Mimi is the daughter of Perry Baird, a doctor who was ravaged by mental depression and suffered through treatments in the 1930s and 1940s, a less-enlightened time for mental treatment where “cures” ran the gamut from being straight-jacketed to being lobotomized.
Mimi discovered a manuscript her father had written while committed (it detailed his escape attempts, his divorce and his fall from grace in the medical community) and then began piecing together the heartbreaking circumstances that occurred decades earlier when father left her at the age of six and the rest of the family refused to talk about him.
In the book, Mimi recounts how she sought to get her father the overdue credit he deserved from the scientific community while also trying to give voice to those suffering from mental illness. (PTI)
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