Robert Mapplethorpe–Patti Smith Memoir to Become Film

Punk icon Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids, about her life with late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, is being adapted into a motion picture screenplay, reports entertainment website Deadline.

Smith will collaborate with Gladiator screenwriter John Logan. Just Kids won the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction and documents the relationship between the two artists from the late 1960s and how they inspired each other to become leaders in their fields. Mapplethorpe, whose innovative, provocative work was often mired in controversy over its graphic sexual imagery, died of AIDS-related causes in 1989.

In 2009 television actress Eliza Dushku announced plans to produce a film about Mapplethorpe that would star her brother Nate, a dead ringer for the photographer.