Comebacks don’t come much better than they do with “Moonlight.” It’s been eight long years since Barry Jenkins‘ last feature, “Medicine For Melancholy,” but he’s made everyone sit up and pay attention to his return, with his new film earning nearly across the board praise, and being marked already as one of the year’s finest efforts. And it looks like Hollywood isn’t wasting time in landing jobs on his desk.
Just last month, Jenkins was tapped to adapt Colson Whitehead‘s bestseller “The Underground Railroad” for a limited TV series, and now his talented pen is being sought again. Deadline reports that Jenkins will write the biopic about Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, who became the first boxer of any gender to win an Olympic boxing title twice in a row, and the first female boxer to win an Olympic title. Her story has already been told in the documentary “T-Rex,” but Jenkins will bring it to cinematic life. But if you think his pen has also recently started to get busy again, you’d been mistaken.
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As the writer/director revealed in an interview with Fader, he’s quietly been working on a variety of projects over the years. One of them was apparently a movie involving a magical vintage Moog synthesizer in an epic story about “Stevie Wonder and time travel.” Wow. Why didn’t it happen? “I think I just didn’t write a good enough script,” Jenkins said.
He also reveals he wrote an adaptation of Bill Clegg‘s memoir “Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man,” about a literary agent who relapses into crack addiction, and nearly loses everything, and also spent some time in writers room of “The Leftovers” season two (though he cautions, “I didn’t get to do much“).
Well, he doesn’t have to worry about lack of work now. “Moonlight” opens on October 21st. Do not miss it.