Doug Moe: Taliesin’s dramatic history ripe for movie

Reading the Hollywood Reporter story made me wonder if the new film script might be based on a 2007 title from the University of Wisconsin Press, Bill Drennan?s “Death in a Prairie House.” I did a column on that book when it was published, and Drennan ? a longtime UW-Baraboo English professor now at Appalachian State University ? told me he was astonished that a book on the 1914 Taliesin murders hadn?t been written earlier. But Drennan?s book was not the source material for the proposed Beresford movie, according to Anne McKenna, who handles subsidiary rights for UW Press. Instead, McKenna said “Death in a Prairie House” had been optioned by another filmmaker, Brent Harris.