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Anaïs Nin Short Stories Optioned To Hook Up With Film & TV

Executive producer Brandon Milbradt has optioned 50 short stories from erotica novelist Anaïs Nin’s including the collections: Delta of Venus, Waste of Timelessness, Under A Glass Bell, and Cities of the Interior— Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur.

Tree L. Wright, the author’s rep at the Anaïs Nin Trust, stated “We were looking for a partner who could do justice to Anaïs’s legacy. We were impressed with Brandon’s body of work, passion for the material and believe that with her background, voice and vision for the adaptation, she’ll do a beautiful job portraying Anaïs’s importance as an artist and feminist figure.”

Milbradt said, “As a feminist precursor to women like Gloria Steinem and Lena Dunham, Anaïs was controversial in her time and she has tremendous relevance today. She took risks, exploring female sexuality, writing explicitly about sex from a female point of view, acknowledging the struggles women had with sexual identity and expression in a patriarchal world, and discussing the role of women in society before anyone else. Her work included frank portrayals of illegal abortions, extramarital affairs and incest, all of which she wrote about without judging her female characters. That’s brave in 2016; in 1940, it was unheard of.”

Milbradt won director and best screenplay awards at HBO’s U.S. Comedy Arts Festival for her 2002 film Hatley High. She followed this up as EP of the IFC-scripted series The Festival and its spinoff series The Business. Currently, alongside EP Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel, Milbradt has Maddaddam in development as a HBO series based on Margaret Atwood’s bestselling trilogy. Milbradt was represented in the deal by Jake Levy of Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell & Vassal.

Nin’s diary provided the source material for Universal’s 1990 film Henry & June, which goes down in the B.O. annals as the first NC-17 release. The Philip Kaufman-directed movie about Nin’s relationship with author Henry Miller and his wife June remains the second-highest grossing NC-17 film at the domestic B.O. with $11.6M after 1995’s Showgirls which made $20.4M.

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