Brokeback Mountain's Oscar-winning helmer Ang Lee has been tapped to direct Taking Woodstock for Focus Features. Lee's longtime collaborator James Schamus (the two have worked together in some capacity on 10 films) is adapting Elliot Tiber's memoir Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, A Concert, and A Life (co-written by Tom Monte) for the big screen.
In the press release announcing the production, Schamus stated, "Elliot’s exuberant and heartfelt story is a perfect window onto the Woodstock experience, exploring an inspiring historical moment when liberation and freedom were in the air."
Focus Features' press release on the upcoming film describes the story and Tiber's life: "Mr. Tiber played an unexpected but pivotal role in making the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Festival into the famed happening it was. Working as an interior designer in Greenwich Village during culturally and politically exciting times, Mr. Tiber felt empowered by the gay-rights movement. But he was also still staked to the family business – a Catskills motel.
As its part-time manager, he had become the local town’s issuer of event permits, granting himself one annually for a small music festival. When he heard that the planned Woodstock concert had had its own permit denied by a neighboring town, he called to offer his own. Soon half a million people were on their way to Mr. Tiber’s neighbor’s farm in White Lake, New York, and Mr. Tiber found himself swept up in a generation-defining experience that would change his life, and American culture, forever."
Director Ang Lee is also said to be attached to A Little Game, a romantic comedy which at one point was set to star Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz.
Source: Focus Features
