Playwright-turned-screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire quite memorably adapted his own Pulitzer prize-winning work for the Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart-starring Rabbit Hole, an intense family drama directed by John Cameron Mitchell that centered on a couple attempting to recover from the sudden loss of their young son. The 2010 drama was one of the year’s best, thanks in no small part to Lindsay-Abaire’s script and Kidman’s powerful Oscar-nominated performance, so it’s certainly good news that the two are pairing up again for another film about a different sort of family and their own set of troubles.
Deadline Douglaston reports that Lindsay-Abaire will adapt Kevin Wilson’s novel “The Family Fang” for the screen, with Kidman starring in and producing the project. The New York Times bestseller hit shelves last year, and it garnered a ton of critical praise – including find a place on end of the year top ten lists complied by “Time Magazine,” “Esquire,” and “People Magazine,” along with a place on Kirkus’ Best Fiction of 2011 and Booklist’s Top First Novels of 2011. Kidman and Per Saari, her partner at Blossom Films, also optioned the book last year, and it appears they’ve made a fine investment.
The story focuses on the Fang family (duh), made up of performance artist parents and their unwitting participant children. Finally grown up and away from their parents’ career (and, from their perspective, their hijinks), the Fang kids are dragged back into a final performance at the behest of their mom and dad. “The Family Fang” opens with a pretty prescient prologue that reads: “Mr. and Mrs. Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief.” You can get a feel for the novel with a mini-preview over at Amazon, so take a peek and sees if it reaches out to bite you.
Lindsay-Abaire has penned some upcoming films of interest – including Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful and DreamWorks’ kiddie flick Rise of the Guardians. He recently earned a Tony nomination for his play Good People.
