Brad Pitt to Adapt 'He Wanted the Moon' by Mimi Baird

Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment has acquired He Wanted the Moon, Mimi Baird's extraordinary act of posthumous collaboration with her father — and Pitt is reported to be considering the lead role himself.

The book's backstory is the pitch: Dr. Perry Baird was a rising Boston physician in the 1940s when bipolar disorder collided with an era that treated mental illness as a moral failing. Institutionalized, subjected to the treatments of the day, he wrote a lucid, harrowing manuscript about his own mind on whatever paper he could get. Mimi, who barely knew him after the family erased him, received the pages decades later in a box — and built the book around them.

Published this year, the memoir drew comparisons to A Beautiful Mind with the gloss off: this is what the asylum era looked like from inside, written by a doctor who understood exactly what was being done to him.

The project joins Plan B's crowded prestige slate, and development timelines being what they are, patience is advised. The book — which is cataloged here — doesn't need the movie; the movie, if it comes, will need every page.