With Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller delivered the most relatable female coming-of-age film we’d seen in… well, forever, successfully funneling 1970s San Francisco counterculture into a timeless narrative that is still notoriously absent from the big screen. Now the director is shifting her gaze forward three decades to depict America’s gay capital circa 2013: the year California’s Supreme Court overturned Proposition 8, making same-sex marriage legal in the state and rainbow-washing Facebook timelines all over the globe.
Heller’s new project will take its fundamental plot lines from Ben Cotner and Ryan White’s HBO documentary The Case Against 8, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The award-winning documentary follows the legal fight to stop Prop 8 through the eyes of unlikely attorney couple Ted Olson and David Boies. The two men teamed up to fight California’s ban on same-sex marriage after facing off against each other in Bush v. Gore in 2000. Olson and Boies put their past behind them to take the cases of same-sex couples from California to the 2015 landmark decision in Washington D.C.
If Making a Murderer has taught us two things, it’s that America loves a) making internet boyfriends out of eminent attorney duos, and b) following a gripping court case despite already knowing the outcome. Throw that into a political climate in which the fight for LGBT rights is just as urgent as ever, and this is shaping up to be one powerful feature. Heller seems just the right person to take its reigns.
Credits
Text Hannah Ongley
Photography Elvert Barnes