PLASTIC PEOPLE
Tom Kalin‘s long-awaited sophomore feature, Savage Grace, based on the book by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, is finally set to go into production this summer.
Savage Grace was named the best true crime book of 1986 by the Mystery Writers of America.
“The book is about the Baekeland family,” explained producer Christine Vachon in a 1998 interview in index magazine. “They invented plastic, but they sold out too early. So even though they made a lot of money, they should have made a lot more. By the ’50s, the fortune was dwindling, and Brooks Baekeland, [the son of Bakelite inventor Leo Baekeland], married a girl who had socialite aspirations. They had a son, and he eventually ended up having an affair with his mother and then killing her. It’s a really cool story.”
Julianne Moore has been cast as Barbara Baekeland, the Bakelite heiress who was stabbed to death by her 25-year-old son, Antony, in her London penthouse in 1972.
A model and would-be Hollywood starlet, Barbara Baekeland was reportedly so deeply distressed by her son Antony’s homosexuality that she attempted to seduce him as a “cure.” When police arrived at the scene of her murder, Antony was calmly placing a telephone order for Chinese food. He was later institutionalized at Broadmoor until a bureaucratic mistake resulted in his release in July 1980. He lived with his grandmother in New York for a short time until he beat and stabbed her. He was eventually sent to Riker’s Island, where he suffocated himself to death on March 20, 1981.
“I’m sometimes drawn to these really extreme things,” says Moore. “I read the script, and there’s some really horrific stuff in it, and I just thought, ‘Oh no… Think I’m going to have to do this one….’ ”
The $12-million production is scheduled to shoot in the UK, Spain and France this July. Killer Films’ Vachon and Pamela Koffler will produce, with Hamish McAlpine and Caroline Stiller of Tartan Films as UK co-producers. John Wells is the film’s executive producer.
Kalin’s debut feature, Swoon (1991), which “put the homo back in homicide,” explored the 1924 kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb.
