Tony Kushner to Adapt Moving Memoir HE WANTED THE MOON to Big Screen

Deadline reports exclusively that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner will adapt Mimi Baird and Eve Claxton's memoir HE WANTED THE MOON for the big screen for Brad Pitt's Plan B and Cross Creek Pictures.

Pitt acquired the rights to the book and will reportedly portray Dr. Perry Baird, a Harvard-educated DOCTOR WHO rose to fame in the medical field during the 1920's by being one of the first to study the biochemical root of manic depression. Ironically, Baird would eventually suffer from the condition which he became fascinated with and be institutionalized just as his groundbreaking research became published.

The story is told from the point of view of the doctor's daughter Mimi Baird, who observed her father as he was institutionalized, had his medical license revoked and ultimately undergo a lobotomy that killed him.

Tony Kushner is best known for his two-part epic, Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols' film of Angels In America, and Steven Spielberg's Munich. His 2012 screenplay for Spielberg's movie Lincoln was nominated for an Academy Award, and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award, Boston Society of Film Critics Award, Chicago Film Critics Award, and several others.

Kushner is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture, a Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement, and the 2012 National Medal of Arts, among many others.

Kushner's plays include A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs!, Hydrotaphia, Homebody/Kabul, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, and Caroline, or Change, the musical for which he wrote book and lyrics, with music by composer Jeanine Tesori.

Photo Credit: Walter McBride / WM Photos

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