Tennessee Williams & Frank Merlo’s secret romance is about to get the Hollywood treatment
Queer—based on the trippy auto-fiction novel from William S. Burroughs—at the Toronto International Film Festival, producer Peter Spears (who also worked on Call Me By Your Name) revealed that he and the filmmaker’s next collaboration would be a feature about Tennessee Williams.Williams, of course, is the gay playwright who penned some of the most acclaimed American plays of all time, many of which included queer themes and characters.
In other words, it’s high time this legend got the big-screen treatment, and Guadagnino seems like just the guy to do it.But this won’t be any old biopic.
The in-development project is based off the 2020 Christopher Castellani novel Leading Men, an “alternative-history fiction,” which imagines what happened during one week in the summer of 1953, a week in which the real-life Williams’ diary mysteriously included no new entries.As the book’s logline reads, its story first takes us to a party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino, Italy, where Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo meet an aspiring Swedish actress, an encounter that “will go on to alter all of their lives.”Color us intrigued!
Last we heard, The Inheritance playwright Matthew López (who also directed Red, White & Royal Blue) was tapped to write the screenplay for Leading Men, so a team-up between him and Guadagnino certainly sounds very exciting—and very gay.But, more importantly, this news reminded us that the passionate, years-long romance between Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo was truly one for the ages, and one very much worth remembering…First reactions to ‘Queer’ are calling it one of the most explicit mainstream gay movies ever.By the time the couple met in 1948, Williams had already cemented his status as one of the greatest living playwrights, having debuted the timeless A Streetcar Named Desire the year prior to great acclaim.Merlo, for his part, was a working-class Sicilian-American actor who had grown up in New Jersey.
