Ang Lee, James Schamus re-team for Taking Woodstock

If we were to say that some Hollywood director and writer were teaming up to make yet another movie about the Summer of Love’s most adapted festival, Woodstock, would you turn on your favorite Grateful Dead album in anticipation or shrug with utter indifference?

Okay, well, what if we were to say that Ang Lee and James Schamus —the same team responsible for Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—would be the ones behind the film? And that while retaining the word "Woodstock" in its title, it would not be about the festival proper, but how it came to be? That’s a dancing bear of a different color, no!?

Lee and Schamus, most recently together on Lust, Caution, will reunite for Taking Woodstock. According to Variety, “the film is assuredly not going to be about the famed concert itself.”

The comedy will be based on a memoir co-written by Elliot Tiber and Tom Monte entitled Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, Concert, and a Life. It will follow our Everyman, Tiber, who works at his parents’ hotel in the Catskills during the week and spends weekends in Greenwich Village with the likes of Truman Capote and Andy Warhol.

Upon hearing that the original permit for the festival, set in Walkill, N.Y., had been cancelled, Tiber contacts festival organizers to let him know about his neighbor, Max Yasgur’s dairy farm. Since he is the official permit issuer in town, he secures a permit to have Woodstock there instead. Little does he know, he is setting into motion a chain of musical and cultural events of unprecedented impact.

The film will also be another foray into homosexuality for Lee and Schamus, since Tiber was a closeted gay man until his experience at Woodstock allowed him to come out in his parents’ small town. That aspect of the memoir has apparently just as much pull on the plot as the festival itself.

The filmmakers are collaborating with Focus Features, where Schamus is CEO, and will hopefully be in production before the end of the year. Although soundtrack choices are seemingly obvious, no original or period music has yet been confirmed.

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