Bitter Frame?

Here's a fascinating (to me, anyway) article by John Brownlow about the trials of writing a script for the upcoming film Sylvia. The film is a biopic about Sylvia Plath, the tortured literary genius who wrote some of the finest poetry of the 20th century in a sort of frenzy during the last months of her life.

If Brownlow, director Christine Jeffs and actress Gwyneth Paltrow can capture a plausible Plath on film they will have the right to call themselves geniuses, if not miracle-workers, in my opinion. Plath's personality was apparently a writhing tangle of contradictions, and she seemed to have intense love/hate relationships with everyone, including her husband, father and mother. Her brilliance seemed to come from the same place as her self-destructiveness--wherever that was. As Brownlow notes, she has been described in various biographies as "perfectly normal, oppressed, manic, depressive, manic-depressive, schizophrenic, a borderline personality, a psychopath, a sociopath, a nymphomaniac, addicted to sleeping tablets, the victim of an Electra complex, a masochist, and very definitely a misogynist. Or was that a feminist?" I think she was probably most of those things, at various times, but they all pale beside the only thing that matters anymore--the poetry.

Anyway, even if you don't care about (or for) Plath, the article offers an interesting take on what it requires to develop a script for such a movie.