Frank Lloyd Wright, the most influential American architect of the twentieth century, is finally going to be portrayed in a movie. It will not be a biopic, however, but a drama that will apparently recreate the murder of Wright’s recently divorced mistress, Martha “Mamah” Borthwick Cheney, and six others by an insane domestic worker on August 15, 1914.

The film is to be called “Taliesin,” after Wright’s Prairie-style hillside studio compound in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where the murders took place. It has been written by “Star Trek” and “Human Stain” scribe Nicholas Meyer and will be directed by the Australian Bruce Beresford, whose films include “Breaker Morant,” “Tender Mercies,” and “Driving Miss Daisy.”

“It’s a very good script,” Beresford told the Hollywood Reporter. "It doesn’t cover [Wright’s] whole life, just a small section of it, and it doesn’t whitewash him into some sort of saint. There is a documentary by Ken Burns [and Lynn Novick] that’s quite good, but it’s odd that there’s never been a [fictional] film about him.”

At the time of the killings, Wright was away from Taliesin overseeing the building of the Midway Gardens entertainment facility in the Hyde Park neighborhood of South Side Chicago, a work on which he collaborated with the sculptor Alfonso Iannelli.

The murderer was Julian Carlton, a manservant from Barbados who had been in Wright’s employ for two months. He set fire to a residential wing of Taliesin and when those inside tried to leave through the only exit he killed them with a hatchet. The victims were Mamah and her children John and Martha Cheney, who were around 12 and 9 respectively; Thomas Brunker, the foreman; Emil Brodelle, a draftsman; David Lindblom, a landscape gardener, and Ernest Weston, the son of the carpenter William Weston. Along with the draftsman Herb Fritz, William Weston survived the attack and helped put out the fire that destroyed most of the wing.

Carlton’s wife, Gertrude, who worked at Taliesin as a cook, escaped through the basement. Carlton drank hydrochloric acid in an attempt to kill himself after his murder spree but survived that and a near-lynching. Taken to Dodgeville’s jail, he died of starvation seven weeks later.

Wright’s affair with Mamah, a feminist intellectual, had been a public scandal that nearly derailed his career. His wife Catherine (“Kitty”), with whom he had six children, had met Mamah at a social club, and Wright had designed a house for her husband, Edwin H. Cheney, in Oak Park Illinois. In 1909, Wright, short on commissions and at a creative impasse, had abandoned his practice and left for Europe with Mamah. They traveled to Berlin, where Wright was to begin work on his two-volume Wasmuth Portfolio (published in 1911). He signed them in at the Adlon hotel as “Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright” and a reporter on the spot wired Chicago that Lloyd was keeping company with a woman who was not his wife. One result of this was that Wright did not receive another major commission until he was asked to design Tokyo’s Second Imperial Hotel in 1915.

In 1911, Wright’s mother Anna bought the land for him on which Taliesin was built as a studio home for himself and Mamah. Anna had been born in Wales and the compound was named for the sixth-century Welsh druid-bard. “Literally the Welsh word [Taliesin] means 'shining brow,'” Wright wrote in his autobiography. “This hill on which Taliesin now stands as 'brow' was one of my favorite places when as a boy looking for pasque flowers I went in March sun while snow still streaked the hillsides. When you are on the low hill-crown you are out in mid-air as though swinging in a plane, the Valley and two others dropping away from you leaving the tree-tops standing below all about you."

In 1923, Wright married Maude “Miriam” Noel, but she was a morphine addict and the marriage was short lived. In 1924, he met Olga Lazovich Hinzenburg, a married ballerina 33 years his junior, at the Petrograd Ballet in Chicago. Their daughter Iovanna was born in 1925, the same year a blaze destroyed a bungalow at Taliesin. (Wright proceeded to build “Taliesin III.”) Married in 1928, they remained together until his death in 1959.

Wright’s affair with Mamah is the subject of Nancy Horan’s feminist novel “Loving Frank” (2007), while the architect’s turbulent love life is  treated more comprehensively in T. Coraghessan Boyle’s novel “The Women” (2009).

There is no word yet on who will play Wright in the movie, for which financing is being sought. “We have someone in mind, but I can’t tell you yet,” Beresford said.  His current film, the independent family comedy “Peace, Love & Misunderstanding,” starring Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener, and Elizabeth Olsen, is expected to open next year.