“Wonder Woman,” the super-heroine movie by Warner Brothers Pictures and DC Films, seems unstoppable in the box office right now. The comic-book inspired blockbuster, directed by now-hot topic Patty Jenkins and starring Gal Gadot, has drawn in a goodly amount of female audiences to a genre that is usually the stomping grounds of boys and comic-reading men. Statistical records have been reached, and even people from the other side of the competition, stars from the counterpart films of Disney and Marvel Studios have been enamored with “Wonder Woman”.
But in the wake of big-budget film from a major movie studio is a smaller project, entitled “Professor Marston & the Wonder Women”. It’s no mock-buster, but rather a biopic of Wonder Woman’s creator William Moulton Marston, and the women in his life who inspired the concept of a female superhero. A teaser was also released that trended on YouTube due to its Wonder Woman connection.
A creator with kinks
“Professor Marston & the Wonder Women” is a biographical drama from Annapurna Pictures about Dr. William Moulton Marston, a psychologist whose research contributed to the invention of the lie detector. The function of this device would later be revisited by Marston on his other major life’s work in comic books.
As an educational consultant for the publishing firms that would later merge into DC Comics, Marston would pitch the idea of a superhero that would fight evil with love, a concept that evolved into Wonder Woman which he developed under the pen name of Charles Moulton.
The character of Wonder Woman was patterned by Marston after two persons, the so-called Wonder Women of the biopic.
The superhuman Amazon took personality cues from Marston’s wife Elizabeth and his secretary Olive Byrne, who also partly inspired Wonder Woman’s physical appearance. The drama film delves into the private life of Marston and his wife, who were in a secret poly-amorous relationship with Byrne that also had elements of bondage.
‘Gaston’ as a ‘feminist’
Annapurna Pictures has cast for “Professor Marston & the Wonder Women” the likes of Luke Evans (“Beauty and the Beast”) as William Moulton Marston, Rebecca Hall (“Iron Man 3”) as Elizabeth Marston, Bella Heathcote (Amazon’s “The Man in the High Castle”) as Olive Byrne, and Oliver Platte as comic book publisher MC Gaines who put Wonder Woman on “Sensation Comics” in 1941. Interestingly Evans, whose last big role was a chauvinist, will now play a feminist advocate in Wonder Woman’s creator.
The film, directed by Angela Robinson will trace the lives of Marston and his lovers through the early days of Wonder Woman as a feminist figure in comics, while keeping their unconventional romantic relationship a secret. Annapurna Pictures has yet to give the movie a release date.
