From 'Ray' to 'Jimi': Why Hollywood (Still) Loves the Musical Biopic

Andre Benjamin in the recent Hendrix biopic ‘Jimi: All Is by My Side’

For nearly two decades, New York-based film producer Peter Newman has been chasing Janis Joplin, developing scripts about her life, securing rights to songs she sang, collecting tales from old band members and former lovers, and lining up first one actress, then another, and then another, all of them determined to sing the Joplin blues.

Such are the demands of rock ‘n’ roll biopics, those hard-fought projects that can seem as much obsession as art or business, with payoffs that are risky, even by Hollywood standards.

This year, music-loving moviegoers were given big-screen biographies celebrating the careers of legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix (Jimi: All Is by My Side); the “Godfather of Soul,” James Brown (Get On Up); and pop’s falsetto kings, the Four Seasons (Jersey Boys). None of them — not even the Clint Eastwood-directed Boys — have made as much money as producers might have hoped or expected, yet these films are only the first in a new wave of music biopics.

Related: Chadwick Boseman Talks About Bringing the Funk in ‘Get On Up’

Love & Mercy, with Paul Dano playing the Beach Boys’ troubled genius, Brian Wilson, debuted at the Toronto Film Festival and will be in theaters next year; Miles Ahead, actor-director Don Cheadle’s take on jazz great Miles Davis, completed filming in Cincinnati last month. The Elton John biopic Rocketman, starring Tom Hardy, is still in development.

And, maybe, Janis?

Probably best known for the 2005 indie The Squid and the Whale, Newman says he’s close to landing a production partner and that he’s “cautiously optimistic” that shooting will begin in the spring of next year, with an eye toward a 2016 release.

Janis Joplin, appearing with Big Brother and the Holding Company, thrilled crowds at 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival 

But he’s been here before — the current incarnation of his project was announced more than two years ago, with its star (Tony Award winner Nina Arianda), writer (Joplin biographer David Dalton), and director (Martha Marcy May Marlene's Sean Durkin) already in place.

Over the years, Newman’s project has had more than its share of false starts (with Lili Taylor, Zooey Deschanel, and Pink among stars attached at one point or another) and outlasted rival projects involving Melissa Etheridge, Renée Zellweger, and Brittany Murphy. (An unrelated Joplin project for actress Amy Adams has gone quiet, though sources say it isn’t dead.)

Fortunately, should Newman’s Joplin project ever go to production, it will already have cleared one major obstacle that confronts anyone who wants to make a musical biopic: the right to use songs written and performed by its subject.

As a result of a deal made with Sony Pictures in the 1990s, Newman holds the rights to most of Joplin’s songs. It is a certainty that Janis would make liberal use of her catalog, from such early concert staples as “Ball and Chain” to her posthumous hit “Me and Bobby McGee.”

Related: André Benjamin on the Experience of Playing Hendrix in ‘Jimi: All Is by My Side’

The producers of Jimi: All Is by My Side, the Jimi Hendrix biopic still in theaters, had no such luxury. “Those first couple of years,” says Danny Bramson, a veteran music-industry bigwig who joined the project four years ago, “all I heard … was: How the hell are you going to make a Jimi Hendrix movie without Jimi Hendrix songs?”

Bramson was denied use of his songs by the Hendrix estate, run by Jimi’s 52-year-old stepsister Janie. (Earlier this year, the estate joined forces with a leading Hollywood talent agency to produce their own biopic.) The small-scale indie had to tell the Jimi Hendrix story without letting audiences hear a single note from “Purple Haze” or “Foxy Lady” or “Are You Experienced?”

'Jimi' filmmakers were denied rights to Hendrix's songs

So Bramson and writer-director John Ridley (who won an Oscar for his 12 Years a Slave screenplay) decided to set their film in the 1966-1967 period prior to Hendrix’s breakthrough performance at the Monterey Pop Festival. This let them rely on songs Hendrix performed but did not write, like “Hey Joe,” “Mannish Boy,” even “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” (Critics, by and large, were satisfied. “Weirdly,” wrote Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, “it works.”)

The lack of song rights was an obstacle faced and overcome (or not) by a few other small-budget musical biopics. The events in 2009’s Nowhere Boy, about a teenage John Lennon, take place a few years before the Beatles were formed; producers got permission from Yoko Ono to use the Lennon-penned track “Mother.” Stoned, the 2005 Brian Jones biopic, relied on blues, R&B, and rockabilly standards (“Little Red Rooster,” “Love in Vain,” “Not Fade Away”) beloved by the Rolling Stones.

1978’s ‘The Rose,’ starring Bette Midler, was originally a Janis Joplin biopic called ‘The Pearl’

There are other workarounds. The 1978 rock drama The Rose was originally a Joplin biopic called The Pearl, but when the studio failed to get song rights, star Bette Midler played a fictional singer not unlike the late singer. Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes’s 1998 glam-rock epic, once hewed more closely to the story of David Bowie and his famed Ziggy Stardust character — until Bowie read the script and refused to OK the use of his songs. With Bowie out, Haynes turned his Bowie-like star into “Brian Slade” and created composite characters loosely based on Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and Marc Bolan.

So why does Hollywood remain enchanted with telling the stories of dead rock ‘n’ roll stars? The obvious answer: money and respect.

Filmmakers want to recapture the kind of commercial — and critical — success enjoyed by two movies that reinvigorated the genre a decade ago. Ray, the 2004 Ray Charles biopic starring Jamie Foxx, took in about $125 million in global box office and won two Oscars (including a best-actor statuette for Foxx); the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line earned $186 million and a more-than-respectable five Oscar nominations (with Reese Witherspoon winning best actress for her turn as June Carter Cash).

Joaquin Phoenix in the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic ‘Walk the Line’  

Other factors come into play. “There are a lot of producers who have close emotional relationships to the music of these artists,” says Franklin Leonard, founder of Hollywood’s the Black List, an annual survey of the industry’s hottest unproduced screenplays. “It’s their dream to make these movies.” (He also points to the industry’s current preference for making movies using established brands: “Jimi Hendrix is a name that’s known throughout the world.”)

Of course, the heirs and estates of dead rockers see movies as a way to promote artistic legacies — and commercial viability.

"A biopic can be one of the biggest tools we have" in extending an artist’s legacy, says Jeffrey Jampol, founder and president of JAM, a Los Angeles-based "legacy estate" management company representing Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and the Doors, Michael Jackson, the Ramones, Tupac Shakur, Rick James, Otis Redding, and Peter Tosh. (JAM’s sole genre outlier: Henry Mancini.)

Related: Miles Beyond the Biopic: Don Cheadle Riffs on a Jazz Legend

Though Jampol concedes the prematureness of his recent disclosure that Martin Scorsese is attached to a Ramones biopic (“It could be years away”), he says his project roster is on firmer ground with director John Singleton’s upcoming biopic of JAM artist Tupac Shakur. Jampol also confirms that his company has optioned Jonathan Gould’s upcoming book Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life.

Rapper Tupac Shakur is the subject of an upcoming movie directed by John Singleton

And then there’s Glow, a possible Rick James biopic that Jampol says will be based on the singer’s posthumously published sex-drugs-and rock ‘n’ roll autobiography (co-written by David Ritz and initiated by Jampol’s company).

No time frame has been announced. “It took two years,” Jampol says, “just to clear the liability issues on the autobiography.”

Of course, anyone who sets out to make a music biopic should be equipped with healthy bit of fatalism. As Janis Joplin sang in “Get It While You Can”: You’re taking a gamble on a little sorrow.

Photo credits: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images, Everett, AP Photo