Los Angeles – At first, filmmaker Gus Van Sant was so affected by Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide that he wanted to make a bio-pic on the Seattle grunge musician’s life.
What he made instead – “Last Days,” which opens Friday at the Mayan Theatre – isn’t one per se. “Last Days” is best described as an impressionistic art/experimental film – a mood piece – that attempts to get inside the confused and agitated state of a rock musician named Blake just before his suicide. The most obvious way it draws parallels to Cobain is through actor Michael Pitt’s haunting resemblance to him.
“I had worked on a few biopics, and all seemed to cave in, a Warhol biopic and a Harvey Milk biopic. And ones that did happen, like ‘The Doors,’ collapsed under the weight of too much information,” Van Sant says during an interview.
In an air-conditioned hotel room on a warm day, the Portland, Ore., resident is dressed for autumn with a zipped-up wool jacket; he keeps his hands in its pockets. He is a youthful 53. His brown hair is brushed downward, although there are bits of gray near the ears. He has directed both commercial successes (“Good Will Hunting,” “To Die For”) and indie landmarks (“Drugstore Cowboy”).
He’s patiently straightforward in explaining his reasons for making such an oblique and abstract movie as “Last Days.”
“Unless you’re making a film 20 hours long, you couldn’t get it all in,” Van Sant says, explaining why a traditional biopic format held no appeal for him. “So I thought maybe there was another way to do it. So this was my idea of how to subvert the convention.
“It’s like a diorama at a natural history museum,” says Van Sant, whose films “Gerry” and “Elephant” also stretched narrative conventions. “You see all the players and all the things, but it’s not storified. (However) there is still a story.”
While Van Sant and others are out to subvert the traditional music biopic, the latter is doing quite well, thank you. In the wake of last year’s Oscar-winning “Ray,” Hollywood is backing films about other famous singers who overcame adversity and became icons.
“It fit in perfectly with the mission statement of the company,” says David Weil, chief financial officer at Anschutz Film Group, which financed “Ray.” (The Los Angeles company is owned by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz.) “Ray Charles was a cultural icon, overcame great adversity, and provided inspiration for people in dealing with difficult life experiences and moving beyond them. And the fact he was a musical legend on top of all that was part of the attraction.”
For instance, 20th Century Fox is positioning “Walk the Line,” a Johnny Cash-June Carter biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, as an Oscar candidate with a tentative Nov. 18 release date. “Walk the Line” concentrates on Cash’s life in the 1950s and ’60s, from the time he made his first rockabilly recordings at Memphis’ Sun Records to when he married Carter in 1968 and became a heroic cultural figure for his tours of prisons.
“I want to shine a light on what people don’t know about him, rather than what they do,” says “Walk the Line” director James Mangold. “I want to show how John Cash started as a pained, brunet James Dean wandering around Memphis and writing the kind of songs he wanted to hear rather than what he did hear.”
Universal, which released “Ray,” is working with singer-actress Kristin Chenoweth of the hit Broadway musical “Wicked” and TV’s “The West Wing” on developing a film about British pop singer Dusty Springfield. Chenoweth brought the project to the studio after watching a documentary on the singer, who enjoyed a sizable U.S. following before her 1999 death.
“I was drawn to the kind of conflicted and complicated growing-up period she had,” Chenoweth says. “I thought this made her a far more complicated person than the ‘Wishin’ and Hopin”‘and ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ singer that we know.”
Meanwhile, traditional bio-pics about more tragic figures also are in the works. MTV Films is working with pop star Usher on a movie about the late soul singer Jackie Wilson, whose early hits were written by a pre-Motown Berry Gordy. Wilson died at age 49, nine years after a debilitating stroke.
And there are no less than three Janis Joplin projects. One, called “Piece of My Heart” and starring Renée Zellweger, is in development. Another reported in the trade press is said to feature the singer Pink. A third, listing in its cast Laura Theodore – who played Joplin in the original Denver theatrical production of “Love, Janis” – has a website.
A British film about the mysterious 1969 death of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones has been completed with the little-known Leo Gregory as Jones. Its director is Stephen Woolley, producer of several Neil Jordan films. A U.S. release date for “Stoned” has yet to be announced.
Although some or even most of these projects never may reach the screen, narrative movies about the following singers, musicians and music-industry figures have in recent years been discussed, optioned, written or made but not theatrically distributed: 50 Cent, the Alarm, the Clash, Spade Cooley, Bob Dylan, Hank Garland, George Gershwin, Florence Greenberg, Bill Haley, Jimi Hendrix, Joy Division, Leiber & Stoller, Freddie Mercury/Queen, Notorious B.I.G., Phil Ochs, Gram Parsons, Dean Reed, the Ramones, the Shaggs, Phil Spector, the Turtles, the Village People, Vivaldi and Hank Williams.
With so many projects in the works, filmmakers besides Van Sant are trying approaches that are unusual or just plain weird.
Take Dylan. “I’m Not There,” inspired by Dylan’s life and work, will feature six characters, including a black orphan who calls himself Woody Guthrie and an androgynous rock star named Jude Quinn hounded by a reporter named Mr. Jones. Todd Haynes (“Velvet Goldmine”) plans to begin filming early next year.
There are also numerous projects about cult favorites who never became famous, at least in the U.S.
Actor John Leguizamo says he wants to star in a long-languishing Fox Searchlight project about Mexican lounge-music and sound-effects pioneer Juan Garcia Esquivel. A favorite of hi-fi and stereo buffs of the 1950s but overlooked by the rock generation, the colorful Esquivel staged a comeback when “space-age pop music” fans championed him in the 1990s. He died in 2002.
“What keeps me passionate about the project is the music,” Leguizamo says. “It’s so wild, so out-of-the-box. How does that dude come up with such trippy concepts and persevere despite all the hard knocks?”
In a truly odd choice, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s Playtone Co. is working on the story of Reed, the Wheat Ridge-born pop singer who joined a radical movement in the 1960s and moved to South America and then East Germany, where he became a star. He visited Denver in 1985 when a documentary about him, “American Rebel,” was shown at the Denver International Film Festival. The next year he died in East Berlin, an apparent suicide.
“Tom is interested in playing Dean Reed, and if the script is great, he’ll follow up with this,” Goetzman says.
A different version of this story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
