Robert Mapplethorpe: Picture

EXCLUSIVE: Matt Smith, best known for playing Doctor Who in that iconic BBC series, is taking on another larger-than-life figure. He has landed the lead role as avant-garde photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in a biopic titled Mapplethorpe in the works from writer-director Ondi Timoner, the two-time Sundance-winning director whose 2015 pic Brand: A Second Coming opened SXSW last year. Girls regular Zosia Mamet has been cast to play Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe’s one-time lover and best friend.

Timoner, who won at Sundance for DIG in 2004 and We Live In Public in 2009, is also producing with Sirad Balducci and Eliza Dushku. The project has the backing of the Mapplethorpe Foundation, and a summer production start is in the works. CAA and UTA co-rep the project.

Deadline. 

Blimey.

I know actors act and all that, but casting the sexless Matt Smith as The King Of The Pervs seems most incongruous.

Perhaps the film will change the leather clubs to tweed and corduroy clubs?

PS Presumably this will be based on Patti Smith's acclaimed memoir, Just Kids.

If it only deals with their relationship we could - hilariously - see Mapplethorpe de-gayed and heterosexualised.

PPS Fagburn is rather looking forward to seeing World Of Wonder's documentary, Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures!

RuPaul Drives...: John Waters

Ru: 'I've always said that people who have uncovered life's twisted hoax find refuge in the irreverent, and twisted and weird. Do you find those people have changed? Are they the same? The ones who flock to the irreverent?'

John: 'They're the same people who've always been my core audience. Minorities that don't even fit into their own minority. They can't even get along with their fellow lunatics. That's my core audience. People in prison with a sense of humour. That's where I always have my best screen tests.'

Fantastico!

World Of Wonder: Wow!

“We’re a production company that’s focused on people considered by many to be marginal or outcasts,” Randy Barbato told the New York Daily News.
“We’ve seen a whole new class of celebrities created by reality TV,” said Fenton Bailey. “This book is a celebration of that. Some people say reality TV is the end of western civilization. I don’t agree. It could be its finest hour.”

The lavishly-tooled The World According To Wonder book is in your shops now!
Thanks for 20 years of good TV, dudes.

PS Also see my favourite blogthing The WOW Report.