At long last, Hollywood is filming both the Jim Morrison and Josephine Baker bio-musicals, and more are in the works: Bobby Darin, Otis Redding, Libby Holman, Tina Turner, Rodgers & Hart. While hoping for the best, can we be blamed for fearing tie worst?
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Memo to would-be movie supernovas Val Kilmer, Demi Moore, Whitney Houston, Lynn Whitfield, and Neneh Cherry: Time to bone up on personal best star turns by Gary Busey, Doris Day, Susan Hayward, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, and Sissy Spacek.
Why? Because, since each of these young troupers is favored to play the lead role in a showbiz biographical film musical, it's important they view the all-too-rare great work in a form that's likelier to produce Dennis Quaid's camp nightclub act in Great Balls of Fire. In this genre once dear to ticket buyers, Academy Award voters, and actors looking to jump-start their careers, Kilmer's leading the pack for director Oliver Stone, having adopted the black leather and smoldering vibe of singer-songwriter-poet-cult figure Jim Morrison in Stone's in-production bio of the late '60s rockers, The Doors. Meanwhile, Moore, in a bio-musical Ray Stark now has in development, is but the latest in a long string of names who may play Libby Holman, the tragic '20s torch singer, and various producers have touted Houston and Cherry to emulate music hall legend Josephine Baker, a role Whitfield will play first in the TV movie HBO's now shooting.
Of course, from the time movies learned to talk, sing, and milk tear ducts, "bio-musicals" have reduced the lives of the rich and famous to an irresistibly cheesy formula, no matter whether the subject was gangster-prone chanteuse Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me, weakling-and-bottle-prone singing actress Lillian Roth in I'll Cry Tomorrow, gangster-prone Broadway and radio queen Fanny Brice in Funny Girl and Funny Lady, dope-and-booze-prone jazz diva Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues, pills-and-breakdown prone Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter, or rock 'n' roll's accident-prone frequent flyer of The Buddy Holly Story.
But, since the '60s, when studios heard the sound of no hands clapping for such mega-buck calamities as Star! (Julie Andrews playing Gertrude Lawrence) and Isadora (Vanessa Redgrave as the dancing Duncan), producers have tended to run the other way when it comes to actually making a musical biopic. Save for the occasional Leadbelly, Bound for Glory, Coal Miner's Daughter, Sweet Dreams, or La Bamba, today's savvy filmmakers put their talent into announcing plans to produce such films, then keeping us all in breathless suspense while changing stars, screenwriters, titles, and starting dates. Luckily, old genres die hard--1990 will surely light up the history books as the year Priscilla Presley launched her weekly whitewash series, "Elvis"-- so who knows, some of the following big screen bio-musicals may actually make it to a mini-mall movie complex next year.
The first new biopic to reach theaters should be Oliver Stone's as-yet-untitled Doors movie. Since 1971, when 27-year-old Jim Morrison died of heart failure in Paris, a soft parade of moviemakers has hoped to capture on film the fast-lane trajectory of rock's Dark Prince. In the early '80s, Morrison's kid sister, Ann, announced a Doors feature film that she would co-produce with her husband. Virtually simultaneously, John Travolta and Brian De Palma sprang up with their Morrison project, Fire, for Paramount. Glitz monger Allan Carr, along with Israeli producer Sasha Harari, optioned No One Here Gets Out Alive, the dubious Morrison biography by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, mentioned as a possible William Friedkin project. Meanwhile, French-Canadian producers dreamed up Morrison Hotel, a fantasia that would speculate on whether Morrison had staged a bogus death and was actually alive and writing poetry in Paris. Rolling Stone summed up the fever with their cover shot in September 1981, captioned "Jim Morrison--He's Hot, He's Sexy, and He's Dead."
John Travolta's brief moment as a contender to play Morrison ended when Doors' camp members apparently blocked him, his would-be director, Brian De Palma, and producer Aaron Russo from obtaining rights to their songs. "John and I did discuss the idea," said producer Aaron Russo of the Paramount project at the time, "but dropped further consideration of the property after concluding that the obstacles were insurmountable." One can only speculate on whether those "obstacles" included how Travolta's abilities might have been over-taxed by attempts to convey Morrison's ferocious charisma, self-destructive hedonism, and a reported IQ of 146. (Doors drummer John Densmore put it this way: "My problem with Travolta was, he just looked too... sweet. Jim wasn't sweet. Jim was crazy.")
In 1985, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, co-chairmen and chief executive officers of Imagine Entertainment, Inc., announced plans to make Riders on the Storm, named for what was, arguably, the Doors' best known song aside from "Light My Fire." Although Morrison's saga should probably play closer to Sid and Nancy than to The Buddy Holly Story, Grazer stressed its "very inspirational" quality, and both screen-writer-director Ralph (_Ticket to Heaven_) Thomas and writer Bob (_Willow_) Dolman attempted to accentuate the positive in their script drafts. Grazer did not rule out Ron Howard as the director. Show me the way to the next whiskey bar.
Just when we feared Opie might slap happy faces on the Doors, Oliver Stone, on the bio-musical rebound after his long-delayed Evita lost its funding and star Meryl Streep, took on the project with Imagine and Carolco. To ape Morrison, Stone apparently favored Val (_Top Gun_, Willow) Kilmer over platoons of unknowns, along with such names as Tom Cruise, Jason Patric, Keanu Reeves, and INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence.
Apparently, Kilmer's sending Stone a 30-minute audio tape of himself singing, and appearing around town in Morrison drag helped convince Stone, who calls himself "obsessed" with Morrison, that he had found his Lizard King. Kilmer, who, we hear, will do his own singing, has apparently had a facial mole surgically removed to more closely resemble Morrison, but will he pull a De Niro by blimping out the way the singer did late in his life? Can you wait?
Stone will also produce Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamour and Excess, Danny Sugerman's account of his tender years with Morrison and the Doors, which Stone calls "a kind of 400 Blows, with Morrison as a supporting character." Sugerman is adapting his book, but will Kilmer rate an encore as Morrison?
Bio-musicals about male show business figures generally presume that career obsessions muck up private lives. Remember Kirk Douglas blowing hot as Bix Beiderbecke in Young Man With a Horn, or Tyrone Power's photogenic suffering in The Eddy Duchin Story? That theme may go double for in-development movie projects about Otis Redding and Bobby Darin. The career of Redding, renowned for his growly, ballsy baritone on soul classics "Respect," "Try a Little Tenderness," and "Dock of the Bay," was fired by the singer-songwriter's fixation with crossing over to "white" music charts. In 1978, Phil Walden, owner of Capricorn Records and a childhood friend of Redding's, announced that The Otis Redding Story would take in his and the soul man's childhood friendship in the South during the civil rights era and end in Redding's death, at 26, in a 1967 plane crash en route to a concert gig. Teddy Pendergrass was first in line to play Redding.
Scripts by three different writers failed to advance the project beyond Big Talk. "We've already seen the stories about how the plane crash killed a guy on the way up," said Dale Pollack, production VP for A&M, the company which owns the publishing rights to Redding's music and is now attached to the movie, referring to the crash-and-burn fade-outs of Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, and Ritchie Valens. "So the [challenge] was, how do you [make the Redding film] without ending up with what is another cliche?"
Cliches or no, Walden has agreed to serve as "consultant," and producer Malcolm Leo (This Is Elvis) recently scouted Georgia locations for the $10 million-ish budgeted project. Admitting he abhors the "typical Hollywood biopic" approach, Leo calls the movie, scheduled for production this year, "a triptych love story between Otis, his wife, and his public." To play Redding, the producers and director Bill Duke (1989's A Raisin in the Sun) hope to find "a spectacular actor, not a musician who acts." Leo says, "I can't think of anything more pathetic than to have an actor miming to existing tracks." Neither can we, except perhaps an actor miming badly to existing tracks. But are the vocal chops of such candidates as Eddie ("Put Your Mouth on Me") Murphy, Denzel Washington, or Carl Weathers up to anything but? Meanwhile, Terence Trent D'Arby or Roland Gift (_Fine Young Cannibals_) could make Otis the role of a lifetime.
On Borrowed Time, Hollywood's other driven-man fable, about singer-actor-songwriter Bobby Darin, is classic three-hankie stuff. Get the picture: Doctors inform the Bronx-Italian family of a cocky, fatherless kid that heart disease will kill the boy by age 16. By 24, Darin is the Grammy-winning crooner of "Splish Splash" and "Mack the Knife," a nightclub headliner, and the husband of Sandra Dee. At 27, he is the star of five movies in one year, one of which, Captain Newman, M.D., wins him an Oscar nomination. At 30, he learns that "sis" is actually his mom and that "Mom" is really his grandmother. At 37, Darin checks out, perhaps even before reaching his peak.
In 1981, Bob Reno and Steven Metz, administrators and publishers of TV and film music, paid $75,000 for the rights to a Darin biography by Al DiOrio. Metz entered a deal with his clients TAT/Tandem, owned by Norman Lear, to produce either a TV or feature film based on the singer's life. By 1982, the producers felt strongly enough about a script by Mark Giordino ("I don't want to do it as a musical," Reno said. "It's too inherently dramatic") to hold casting calls and meetings in New York and Los Angeles, spurning Paul Anka, Johnny Rivers, and Burton Cummings in hopes of finding an unknown. Although the project was temporarily derailed by such complications as having been denied the Sandra Dee seal of approval (apparently, the ex-Gidget refuses to have herself portrayed by name), Barry Levinson (_Rain Man_) is reportedly set to direct On Borrowed Time this year for Warner Bros. Levinson's involvement should surely help with a generation whose exposure to Darin is limited to "Mac Tonight" homages from McDonald's.
Hollywood also plans big things for Josephine Baker and Libby Holman, two heartbreak divas who rose to glory in the '20s. Since the mid-΄70s, Baker (who escaped St. Louis shantytowns to dazzle Jazz Age Parisians with her naked shimmying as a Folies-Bergère sensation) has inspired such producers as Lord Lew Grade, Carlo Ponti, and Allan Carr to think marabou, bangles, and sequins. Awarded the Legion of Honor for Resistance work, Baker later survived Red-baiting by columnist Walter Winchell and, although she was lionized by worldwide concert audiences in autumn years, wound up homeless with twelve adopted orphan children. "What a story," as Thelma Ritter put it in All About Eve, "everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end."
The year before Baker's death in 1975, Sir Lew Grade announced he would star Diahann Carroll in a Baker bio-pic. Grade's partners, agents Hank Kaufman and Gene Lerner (dealmakers for Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane), had extracted rights and clearances from Jo Bouillon, Baker's husband, and her adopted offspring.
The publication within a year of each other of two Baker books sparked competition for a Baker musical. In 1979, producer Alan Carr joined with Grade, Kaufman and Lerner to film Boullion's biography Josephine and, despite contradictory evidence supplied by Mahogany and The Wiz, Carr gushed to the press that Diana Ross, "the only logical successor to Josephine Baker's crown of glamour and spectacle," would star. Meanwhile, producer Edward S. Shaw bought Stephen Papich's Remembering Josephine as the basis for a $10 million rival bio-musical, to which were reportedly attached Diahnne Abbot and Robert De Niro, then-married co-stars of New York, New York. Angry Shaw vs. Lerner-Kaufman letters kept lawyers on red alert.
Diana (call her Miss) Ross may have hoped to cut out the middlemen by optioning Naked at the Feast, yet another Baker book, by Lynn Haney. Over the years, while the project was on and off more often than a Beatles reunion, the press intimated that Ross and Paramount, her producing studio, were at odds over creative control. Meanwhile, Ross hired screenwriters, considered such directors as Franco Zeffirelli, and picked the brains of fashion maven Diana Vreeland.
As late as last year, never-say-die Ross fantasized about wowing her fans in a $20 million Baker extravaganza, decked out not only in Dior and Balenciaga knockoffs but also less formally. "If there's an artistic way to be nude and beautiful," the 45-year-old songbird mused about her dream project to an interviewer, "I would certainly consider it because that's part of being who Josephine Baker was." Although we discount rumors that a sequence in the Ross script stages Baker's signature tune, "J'ai Deux Amours," as a hand-holding concert audience sing-along, shouldn't actresses limit themselves to trashing one legend per lifetime?
Anyway, Ross better watch her back because HBO is shooting a cradle-to-grave pay-TV saga called "Josephine Baker," from the unlikely producer-director-writer team of HBO's "Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story." Co-executive producer Robert Halmi says, "Josephine's story encompasses much of our historical and political maturity, in a life story that's both entertaining and a morality play." This serious viewpoint suggests that the budget will not go haywire on costly ostrich feathers, anyway. Playing Josephine Baker is not Irene Cara or Holly Robinson--considered front runners for the role--but one Lynn Whitfield, who you may remember from "The Women of Brewster Place." (Then again...) With this biopic underway, don't be surprised if another Baker movie gets going, and soon. Dueling showbiz flicks in the past have included two movies each about Frances Farmer, Jean Harlow, Liberace, and Dorothy Stratten.
So Orion may well green-light for production this summer a feature on Baker's early years based on Jazz Cleopatra by Phyllis Rose, published last year. "Our project," says Howard Rosenman of Sandollar, one of five co-producers of that epic, "focuses on Josephine taking Paris by storm, meeting an Italian nobleman and [nightclub queen] Bricktop, who fight for her soul and body, and on the politicization of a girl who had to leave America to become a star." The screenplay, by George (_The Colored Museum_) Wolfe, will be entrusted to Hugh Hudson, the guiding hand of Revolution and Lost Angels. (Just who we would choose.)
To date, perky Whitney Houston balked at the nudity entailed, so the project's backers say they may consider unknowns, or pop star Neneh Cherry might modify her buffalo stance for Baker's outrageous Banana Dance. A "big black star" will play Bricktop (big as in Tina, Whoopi, or Oprah?) and, to play the Italian lothario dubbed by Bricktop "the no-account count," we are promised "a major male star." And remember, George Hamilton does not count.
While folks have been competing to make the first Baker movie, Ray Stark--king of such latter-day bio-musicals as funny Girl and funny Lady--has harbored an obsession with filming the tempestuous life of Libby Holman. Holman, who torched Broadway with renditions of "Moanin' Low" and "Body and Soul," forsook the footlights (and, allegedly, such lovers as stage great Jeanne Eagels) to marry tobacco heir Zachary Smith Reynolds, who, eight months later, died of gunshot wounds in the wee small hours after one of his and Libby's notorious parties. After murder charges against Holman and her husband's strapping, constant companion were dropped, Holman stoked her notoriety by braving a comeback and dragging her famous in-laws through courts to win a $6 million trust fund for her son. An acerbic, randy ruin in later years, Holman hobnobbed with Dorothy Parker, Clifton Webb, and Noel Coward, and became an intimate of Montgomery Clift before she died at 65.
In 1977, Ray Stark announced his intention to buy for filming Jon Bradshaw's Holman biography Dreams That Money Can Buy (which was not published until 1985). Some say Stark saw the project as a reunion with his Funny Girl/_Lady_ star Barbara Streisand--certainly at the time she was ideal casting. Stark hired Gore Vidal to script the singer's life, and set Herbert Ross to direct. "Of course," Vidal was quoted as saying at the time, "everyone wants to know, did she kill him or didn't she?" Vidal believed she had shot her husband. "Delighted" by Vidal's screenplay, Stark reportedly settled on moist eyed Jill Clayburgh to play Sweet Libby, which was announced for a 1981 start date.
In 1980, producers Paul Picard and William Woodfield announced preproduction on a Warner Bros. project based on Libby, a biography by Milt Macklin which might have starred Cher--or Sally Field--had it ever gotten off the ground. Bloodied but unbowed, Stark, in 1981, set to work Frederic Raphael (_Darling_, Glittering Prizes) on another script draft, succeeded, two years later, by a new attempt by Richard Kramer ("Kent State," a telefilm). Stark annexed director Karel Reisz (_Isadora_, Sweet Dreams), and Debra Winger emerged as a shoo-in for the hellcat Holman role.
In 1985, a year later, Reisz had been succeeded by James Bridges, Winger's Urban Cowboy and Mike's Murder director. Eventually Debra Winger and Bridges, too, moved on and, by early 1986, Madonna was reportedly set to tackle Libby. More recently, Demi Moore and director Richard Pearce (_Country_) were mentioned for the project but, according to producer Marykay Powell, Stark is awaiting a new screenplay from Diana Hammond (_Princess Daisy_) before making any further moves. "What Libby needs is Strindberg," says a former associate of the project, "what Libby has is Ray Stark."
That's not all, folks--also in preproduction are bio-musicals about such rock legends as Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and Roy Orbison (perhaps to be played by Martin Sheen). What, no Four Freshman movie? Touchstone is developing I, Tina: The Tina Turner Story, with Howard (_Little Shop of Horrors_, Little Mermaid) Ashman writing the saga of the funky-rock-star-turned-Plymouth-shill. At Hollywood Pictures, producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan are developing two unlikely "and-then-I-wrote" bio-musicals, Rodgers and Hart, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Guess they're sure there's a movie in composer Richard Rodgers's life, somewhere. Then, there is Bette (Born for Bio-Musicals) Midler's project at Touchstone about all-gal band leader of the '40s, Ina Ray Hutton, and another, at Tri-Star, in which Midler would emote for Meron and Zadan as cabaret-musical legend Lotte Lenya, a.k.a. Mrs. Kurt Weill. Toney, too, is Martin Scorsese's long-promised Gershwin project from a Paul Schrader screenplay, and the two all-singing, all-tapping Bill "Bojangles" Robinson movies, planned by independent producers--one starring Ben Vereen, who knows a thing or two about tap dancing, but the other starring jazz singer Scotty Wright, of all people. Resin up those violin strings, boys, and break out the pink-and-amber gels.
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Charles Oakley, born in Santa Rosa, writes occasionally on the music scene, but prefers working with his hands.