A documentary about beloved jazz great Billie Holiday–appropriately titled Billie–is in the works and will reportedly feature new interviews from the icon’s contemporaries.
According to The Hollywood Reporter James Erskine will helm the film and has received support from the successor to Billie Holiday’s estate, Concord. The film will follow Holiday’s life through the eyes of 1970’s journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl.
More than 200 hours of interviews with Charles Mingus, Sarah Vaughn, Tony Bennett, Count Basie will be featured, as well as some of Holiday’s classmates, her step-parents, her cellmate, her drug dealer, her pimp and even the FBI agent who arrested her will be in the documentary.
Kuehl died in 1979 without completing her book about the “Strange Fruit” singer. Her interviews will be seen for the first time in the forthcoming documentary.
Holiday, real name, Eleanora Fagan, died in 1959. Her life was brought to the big screen in 1972 in the now beloved film Lady Sings the Blues, starring Diana Ross and Billy Dee Williams.
“We are thrilled to be working with the creative team of James Erskine and New Black Films, who have taken great care to produce a documentary that honors the life and work of Billie Holiday in an exciting, genre-defying way,” she said in a statement.
