If you loved Jill Soloway’s forays into academia on “Transparent” (including her on-screen stint as an over-the-top women’s studies lecturer in Season 1), you’re in luck: the writer/director is bringing more nutty professors to the small screen.
Amazon has ordered a pilot called “I Love Dick” from the celebrated writer/director. Soloway will direct the episode, which will be adapted from Chris Kraus’ novel of the same name by Sarah Gubbins. The story centers on an artsy Texan married couple who become obsessed with a disagreeable but charismatic professor named Dick. (The broad outlines of the story are difficult not to associate with Soloway’s new relationship with poet Eileen Myles, who plays a sexual svengali of a scholar on “Transparent’s” sophomore season.)
Soloway and Andrea Sperling will executive produce and Gubbins co-EP.
Here’s the “I Love Dick” book description from Amazon:
In “I Love Dick,” published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of “Aliens & Anorexia,” “Torpor,” and “Video Green,” boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It’s no wonder that “I Love Dick” instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers. The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America and away from her husband; and far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first-person narrative. “I Love Dick” is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn’t afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world; and it’s a book you won’t put down until the author’s final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.
[via Deadline]
