Variety first reported the project. Jamie Dawson is writing the screenplay and Fred Bernstein, who partnered with Holland on Green Border, will produce.
The film focuses on the point when Kosinski’s reputation collapsed after The Village Voice journalists Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith questioned his authorship and use of a ghostwriter, casting doubt on the supposedly autobiographical horrors in The Painted Bird.
“At one moment, American reporters learned he’d used a ghostwriter and that the events he called autobiographical weren’t entirely so,” Holland told festival audiences.
“What matters more – artistic truth or literal truth? How quickly can someone be erased for breaking the rules?”
Kosinski, author of Being There as well as The Painted Bird, died by suicide in New York on May 3, 1991 – the day Holland, in the city promoting Europa, Europa, met him for the last time.
“He enjoyed an incredible rise and a brutally steep fall,” she said. “Why did he take his life – the collapse or the trauma of his youth?”
Holland unveiled a teaser for Franz in Karlovy Vary; casting and production dates for Rabbit Garden have yet to be announced.
(jh)
Source: PAP