Doesn't this little news item tie nicely with the recent Criterion release of Ang Lee's tonal masterpiece, The Ice Storm. With his regular writing partner and producer, James Schamus, Lee is taking on Elliot Tiber's memoir Taking Woodstock as his next project. Although personally, I was not a gigantic fan of his last film, Lust, Caution, the directors eye for character and period detail to accentuate the drama (or melodrama) on screen is pretty much unparalleled in contemporary filmmaking.

...Tiber, who works at his parents’ hotel in the Catskills during the week and spends weekends in Greenwich Village with the likes of Truman Capote and Andy Warhol. Upon hearing that the original permit for the festival, set in Walkill, N.Y., had been cancelled, Tiber contacts festival organizers to let him know about his neighbor, Max Yasgur’s dairy farm. Since he is the official permit issuer in town, he secures a permit to have Woodstock there instead. Little does he know, he is setting into motion a chain of musical and cultural events of unprecedented impact.

Production of Taking Woodstock should being somewhere by years end.