I first became aware of Eva Cassidy in 2001, when I happened to hear her live cover of “Tall Trees in Georgia,” the 1968 song by Buffy Sainte-Marie. I did some research and discovered that Cassidy, who died of melanoma in her early 30s, had experienced virtually no success as a singer during her brief lifetime. It was only after her death that her music, passed along to a record executive by one of her friends, connected with a massive (and still-growing) audience, including the musicians Sting and Paul McCartney. 

Cassidy, like me, was from Maryland, and at some point I decided it might be worth reaching out to her family to explore the possibility of writing a screenplay about her life. I met with her parents, Barbara and Hugh Cassidy, late in 2001, and with their blessing, and over the course of the following 10 months or so, I ended up interviewing several dozen of the people who knew Cassidy best. I finished Silver Girl, the resultant script, in September 2002. 

In the end, the Cassidys were not comfortable with my rendering of their daughter’s story—not an atypical response from the surviving relatives of the real-life subject of a feature film. After several attempts to convince them otherwise, I had to let this one go at the end of 2002. 

In the past 20 years, a number of other filmmakers have approached the Cassidys, but a film has never been made.