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Ang Lee's new movie: Taking Woodstock

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Kd5000:
I saw someone had posted this article on IMDB.com.  I don't know how gay themed Elliot Tiber's 2007 book, "Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life."   Anybody read the book?  Sounds interesting.  How come no other A-list directors are doing gay themed projects. Sean Penn is the exception with his film "MILK," about the late Harvey Milk?

ANG LEE, FOCUS TREK TO 'WOODSTOCK'

By Gregg Goldstein
April 22, 2008


NEW YORK -- Ang Lee is again teaming with Focus Features CEO James Schamus to direct the gay-themed Woodstock memoir "Taking Woodstock."

Focus will produce and Schamus will adapt Elliot Tiber's 2007 book, "Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life." It centers on the colorful life of a Greenwich Village-based interior designer and part-time Catskills hotel manager who headed the Bethel, N.Y., Chamber of Commerce. He issued the permit for the legendary 1969 concert on his neighbor Max Yasgur's farm.

Lee and Schamus' most recent collaboration was Focus' Chinese-language drama "Lust, Caution," which earned $66 million worldwide. The writing-directing pair had their breakthrough indie hit with the gay-themed comedy "The Wedding Banquet" in 1993, and Lee directed Focus' biggest hit, the gay Western "Brokeback Mountain," in 2005.

There have been several Woodstock docus but few narrative films touching on the music festival, one of the few being Tony Goldwyn's "A Walk on the Moon."

Tiber wrote his Square One Publishers memoir with Tom Monte.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i70aa3109f659b5ab635a93f59065cd26

MaineWriter:
Here's a review about the book:

From Publishers Weekly
A humble motel owner and his parents become the heroes in carrying off the momentous 1969 Woodstock rock concert in Tiber's occasionally improbable yet thoroughly entertaining tale. Tiber, né Teichberg of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, put on hold his personal ambition in the mid-1950s as an artist to help his aging Old World Jewish parents run their ramshackle resort motel in White Lake, deep in the Catskill Mountains. Hounded by the guilt that he can't live up to his parents' standards and driven by his own covert homosexuality, Tiber pokes fun at what he calls the Teichberg Curse, a scourge that won't allow the family to escape financial ruin. As head of the Chamber of Commerce in his small town, and possessed of the yearly permit to hold summer music concerts, Tiber gets wind of rock concert promoter Michael Lang's need for a venue to hold the Woodstock festival. A month of frenzied preparations ensues as Max Yasgur's farm is secured, the anticipated numbers swell, and tensions grow in the town. Yet the planning of the concert makes up only one part of Tiber's very human story, which includes affecting side chapters on brushes with artists (Mark Rothko, Robert Mapplethorpe) and standing defiant when the cops raided the West Village gay bar Stonewall.

MaineWriter:
They have an excerpt of the first chapter at amazon.com and I just read it. It's funny, looks like it could be a funny book.

L

Kd5000:
Lee must have some interest in that time period. THE ICE STORM which was adapted from a book set in 1973, BBM which started in 1963 and now a film set during the time of Woodstock. It doesn't bother me as I like movies set in the late sixties or the early 1970's.  THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, I'm surprised Lee didn't take project up. 

Brown Eyes:

Thanks for posting this info. :)  Very interesting. :)

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