Breaking Baz: Pauletta & Denzel Washington & Their Children Make ‘The Piano Lesson’ A Family Affair – Telluride Film Festival
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Pauletta Pearson Washington says that the film adaptation of August Wilson’s acclaimed play The Piano Lesson has been a family affair. “All my babies are involved in this,” the actor, musician and philanthropist declares. “My son directed it,” she says pointing to filmmaker Malcolm Washington, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Virgil Williams. “And John David’s in it,” Washington adds, referring to her eldest child, the actor John David Washington. “And so is Olivia, we play the same role at different ages,” she says proudly of daughter Olivia Washington. “And here’s Katia,” who was seated by her at a cocktail party hosted by Netflix to celebrate the streamer’s roster of movies being screened at the Telluride Film Festival.
Katia is an executive producer of The Piano Lesson. Her husband Denzel Washington is a producer of The Piano Player, and with producing partner Todd Black, the Oscar-winning actor has pledged to bring to bring to the screen the entirety of Wilson’s ten-part American Century Cycle of plays.
Thus far Fences, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – and now The Piano Lesson– have found their way to the screen. It has not been officially confirmed or announced, but I understand that the next of Wilson’s plays to be realized on celluloid is likely to be Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which was first staged in 1988.
Denzel Washington and Todd Black will produce the drama that’s set in Pittsburgh in 1917. It’s about a man returning to his family and hometown having spent seven years enslaved on a chain gang. “They couldn’t have chosen a better person than my husband to make sure all the works are given respect,” Pauletta Washington tells us.
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