Filmmaker adapting the acclaimed memoir.
Lynn Shelton (‘Touchy Feely,’ ‘Your Sister’s Sister,’ ‘Humpday’) has confirmed, via ThePlaylist, that she is teaming up with producer Anne Carey (‘The American,’ ‘Adventureland,’ ‘Thumbsucker’) to develop an adaptation of Mishna Wolff’s best-selling memoir ‘I’m Down.’
Wolff’s book, published in 2009, is described as follows:
“Mishna Wolff grew up in a poor black neighbourhood with her single father, a white man who truly believed he was black. ‘He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esqe sweater, gold chains and a Kangol—telling jokes like Redd Fox, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson. You couldn’t tell my father he was white. Believe me, I tried,’ writes Wolff. And so from early childhood on, her father began his crusade to make his white daughter Down.
Unfortunately, Mishna didn’t quite fit in with the neighbourhood kids: she couldn’t dance, she couldn’t sing, she couldn’t double dutch and she was the worst player on her all-black basketball team. She was shy, uncool and painfully white. And yet when she was suddenly sent to a rich white school, she found she was too “black” to fit in with her white classmates.
I’m Down is a hip, hysterical and at the same time beautiful memoir that will have you howling with laughter, recommending it to friends and questioning what it means to be black and white in America.”
Shelton’s next, the Andrea Seigel-scirpted dark comedy ‘Laggies’ starring Anne Hathaway, Chloe Moretz, Sam Rockwell and Mark Webber, is set to begin shooting in June.