This year marks 75 years of Wonder Woman, and DC Comics is celebrating in all kinds of ways, including the United Nations declaring an official “Wonder Woman Day.” Now the story of Wonder Woman’s ahead-of-his-time creator, Dr. William Moulton Marston, is coming to life as a film.
According to Deadline, Professor Marston & The Wonder Women, which is described as “the unconventional true story behind the creation of the most famous female comic book superhero of all time”, began filming this week. The biopic is being written and directed by Angela Robinson, and stars Luke Evans as Marston, Rebecca Hall as his wife Elizabeth, and Bella Heathcote as their romantic partner Olive Byrne.
How unconventional was the creator of Wonder Woman? For starters, Dr. William Moulton Marston was a Harvard psychologist and the inventor of the lie detector. Not only was he an early feminist, but was in fact a female supremacist, believing women should rule the world. He and his wife, fellow psychologist and inventor Elizabeth Marston, had a polyamorous relationship with a young woman named Olive Byrne, a former student of Marston’s and an academic and feminist in her own right.
Their ideas of female empowerment were literally decades ahead of their time–remember, this is the early ’40s–and somehow they managed to slip them into a comic book aimed at children. Dr. Marston was also heavily into bondage, and he slipped that into the comics too, something the movie will no doubt touch upon.
William Marston created Wonder Woman with significant input from both Elizabeth and Olive, who put as much of their feminism into the character as could be allowed by 1941 standards. After his death from cancer in 1947, Elizabeth and Olive raised their children by Marston together and remained a couple until Olive’s death in 1988.
The new movie will explore how they all dealt with the controversy surrounding Wonder Woman’s creation—which a highly homophobic society said would turn young girls into lesbians—all while the three protagonists had to conceal a romantic and family life that, if exposed to the world, could have ended all their careers and even put them behind bars.
No release date has been given for the movie, but with Wonder Woman hitting theaters in her first live-action film next year, expect it to be around the same time.
Are you excited about the true story behind Wonder Woman finally making it to the big screen? Let us know your thoughts down below in the comments.
Images: DC Comics
