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Patti Smith Memoir Just Kids Will Be a Showtime Series
The singer's memoir is often called a eulogy to legendary gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Showtime announced plans for a limited series adaptation of Patti Smith's best-selling memoir Just Kids.
The show will be written by Smith and Penny Dreadful producer John Logan (an Out100 honoree), according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The memoir, which won the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction, details the beginnings of the punk singer's career and documents her long relationship with best friend and early lover Robert Mapplethorpe. The two lived together as they established themselves on the gritty bohemian arts scene of New York's Lower East Side in the early 1970s.
Mapplethorpe would go on, of course, to become an internationally renowned photographer, best known for his stunning black-and-white photographs of erotic encounters between men. He died of AIDS complications in 1989.
Many critics have called Just Kids a eulogy of sorts to Mapplethorpe.
The book features a decidedly LGBT cast of influential characters, including Smith's literary idols William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg --who tried to pick up the androgynous singer because he initially mistook her for a pretty boy -- as well as the musician and writer Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries).
"A limited series on Showtime will allow us to explore the characters more deeply, enabling us to develop stories beyond the book and allow a measure of unorthodox presentation," Smith said in press release about the upcoming show. "The medium of a television limited series offers narrative freedom and a chance to expand upon the themes of the book."
