In 1984, Patricia Bosworth’s “Diane Arbus: A Biography” was published, the first and thus far only treatment of the photographer’s life. Bonnie Timmermann, then in the early stages of her career as one of film’s finest casting directors, read the book when it came out and was completely fascinated with Arbus and her work. As Timmermann recalls, “I started to look at Diane’s photography very carefully before I even knew I wanted to produce a movie. From my first exposure to her work I felt like there was a part of me in her photographs, whether it was an eyelash, an elbow, a knee, a finger or toe. So my relationship with her photographs has always been very personal, like I had a bond with her. I know other people feel that as well.”

Timmermann eventually inquired about rights to the Bosworth book, only to learn that they were unavailable. Since 1984, the rights had been held variously by MGM, Lorimar, and Barbra Streisand; different actresses, directors, producers and writers had come and gone. Timmermann, who is a friend of Bosworth’s, kept tabs on the option status over the years until the rights finally became available in 1997, at which point she brought the project to producer Edward R. Pressman, who agreed to partner with Timmermann and optioned the book through his Edward R. Pressman Film Corp. Once they had the rights, Timmermann and Pressman spent the next six years developing the film. Over that time, three different directors became attached each with their own take on the material. Today, Pressman notes that “though all of these directors had their own vision, they all planned on making a traditional bio-pic of Arbus.”

Then, in 2002, Timmermann and Pressman saw Shainberg’s SECRETARY, and were knocked out by its daring, erotic, darkly funny and psychologically acute take on the perverse relationship between a lawyer and his new secretary. SECRETARY was executive produced by Michael Roban, who had joined Pressman’s company at the time, ContentFilm, as head of business affairs. Through Roban, Pressman and Timmermann contacted Shainberg right away. “Steve came up to see us,” recalls Timmermann, “and he told us of his passion for Diane Arbus and the many years that he’d wanted to direct a movie about her and her photography. He knew so much about her: he knew her family, he knew all of her photographs and everything she wrote. And he had an idea about how to make this into a film.”

Shainberg had tried at different times over a 15-year period to acquire the rights to the Bosworth biography. “I’d had a lot of time to think about how you make a movie about Diane Arbus,” he says. “From my point of view, the thing we see when we look at an Arbus photograph, and the reason why her photographs are so unusual and moving, is that they’re really about a long, complicated relationship that she had with the subject. We get a single frame, one picture of the Jewish giant with his parents standing beside him, the mother looking up at him. But the truth is, Arbus had a ten-year relationship with Eddie Carmel and she took hundreds and hundreds of pictures of him on many, many occasions. But she only published that one picture. But that one picture was created, and found, and taken because of that long relationship she had with him. That’s true of many of her subjects. So when I met with Bonnie, my main point about the proposed film was that it had to deal with the intimacy between Arbus and the subject. A film about Diane Arbus needed to be about the making of one photograph.”

Timmermann and Pressman agreed, and with that, FUR began to move forward. Shainberg’s friend and SECRETARY screenwriter, Erin Cressida Wilson, happily signed on to write the script and they set to work. Edward R. Pressman Film Corp. announced Shainberg and Wilson’s involvement in the long-simmering project in July 2003.