Jennie Franks is an English playwright and filmmaker. She was the first wife of Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson, and wrote some of the lyric for the Jethro Tull song " Aqualung" (1971).
Franks co-wrote and directed an educational film about the effects of AIDS in rural Colorado titled Soft Smoke, AIDS in the Rural West. [1] [2] She wrote and acted in the play Stuck!, about "one woman's courageous struggle to get out of a locked basement bathroom at a coffee house and reclaim control of her stalled life", which debuted in New York in 2008. [3] She filmed The Ballad of Arthur Muldoon with Terry Jones. [4]
Franks founded SPARKy Productions in 1998, a group dedicated to highlighting social justice issues via creative performance, and acts as its artistic director. [5] The organization produced the annual Telluride Playwrights Festival. [5] The film festival culminated in 2016 with Franks' production of The Hispanic Women's Project. [6]
Franks was the first wife of Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson, from 1970 to 1974. She wrote some of the lyric for the Jethro Tull song " Aqualung" (1971). Ian Anderson, the principal songwriter for Jethro Tull, has said, "[she] in fact was responsible for lyrics in the first couple of verses ... I suppose in total probably about half of the lyrics were words or word associations that she had come up with," based on pictures of homeless men Franks had taken as a photography student. [7] "And so she wrote some words and we fashioned that into lyrics. Some of the lines were definitely not lines I would have written. Like, “Snot is running down his nose” was not one of mine [laughs], it was one of hers." [8]
Franks later[ when?] moved to Los Angeles and married screenwriter and novelist Jeffrey Price. They relocated to Telluride, Colorado in 1993. [1] Franks and her second husband have two daughters.[ citation needed]