The writer describes it as “the most incredible email I’ve ever received” and, after putting down the phone to retrieve the message, reads it aloud: I could relate to this idea of a family curse - we’ve had a lot of hardship - and the way the women in Dominick’s life are the ones who teach him how to be whole in the end,” Ruffalo says.īefore he even finished the book, Ruffalo fired off an email to Evashevski, who forwarded it to Lamb. “I’m a second-generation Italian immigrant from really poor people who worked their way up as house painters. The identity of their biological father is a gnawing mystery.īorn on either side of midnight on New Year’s Eve, their lives follow similarly divergent trajectories: Thomas is a paranoid schizophrenic in and out of institutions most of his adult life, while Dominick is a house painter who is both utterly devoted to and resentful of his brother, at the cost of other relationships - including his marriage to ex-wife Dessa (Kathryn Hahn). Written and directed by Derek Cianfrance, the six-part series charts the saga of Dominick and Thomas Birdsey (both played by Ruffalo, who also executive produced), who are raised in a tense and sometimes violent household in a working-class town in Connecticut by their mother (Melissa Leo) and stepfather (John Procaccino). Here are 6 reasons whyĪ mode of communication designed to get us to stay home, often skewered as the “boob tube” or “idiot box,” TV kept its lights on as others flickered out.

Television TV is the medium of our coronavirus plague year. “I thought, OK, this is just what happens when Hollywood starts flirting with you, like the cute girl who says, ‘I’m going to go to the prom with you’ but it never happens.” The author longed to bring his story to a wider audience but grew weary of empty overtures from the industry. “I had written an unreasonably long story and nobody could quite figure out how to fit something that large into a two-hour box,” Lamb recalled by phone from his Connecticut home. But the adaptation languished in development hell. Big-name talent including Matt Damon, Jonathan Demme and Jim Sheridan were attached to the project along the way, and numerous screenwriters attempted to tame the 900-plus-page book, which spans from the 1920s to the 1990s and includes a story-within-a-story about the brothers’ Sicilian grandfather. Twentieth Century Fox gobbled up the movie rights for a reported seven-figure sum. Before it was even published in the summer of 1998, Hollywood began circling “I Know This Much Is True.” Despite its Tolstoy-esque length and often grim subject matter, Wally Lamb’s novel about identical twin brothers became a massive bestseller, boosted by what was then the ultimate endorsement: Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club.

I know this much is true wally