Jeff Buckley: The Movie
moster78
Posts: 1,591
Here's an interesting article for all the Buckley fans out there:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/movies/29brow.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1162482386-XHAsW8E7tVctqQbUyjjNzg
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/movies/29brow.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1162482386-XHAsW8E7tVctqQbUyjjNzg
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I think it could go either way. I like the idea of what she feels and her added thoughts of losing her husband and her son both in very odd ways.
But I think a little help from outside the circle would be nice too. I am interested in how this project will work itself out.
she should be there to tweak the relationship she had with her son...and that's it. she doesn't know anything about the interpersonal workings of him out on the road and him out in the world...i feel as you do...the move she makes is going to be boring and flat instead of dynamic and intriguing like jeff buckley was.
from my window to yours
Soon the movie people came calling, wooing his mother, Mary Guibert, for the rights to tell his story and to use his music in the telling. But Ms. Guibert, wary of letting her son’s memory be exploited, was a tough customer.
Brad Pitt, who at one point had called himself obsessed with Mr. Buckley’s music, struggled for two years to make a film inspired by his life. But Ms. Guibert rejected the scripts he developed as straying too far from reality. She shot down another effort, in part because the screenwriter imagined a scene with Mr. Buckley on LSD, hallucinating a meeting with his father, Tim Buckley, the 1960’s folk and jazz troubadour, who died in 1975 (and whom Jeff barely knew). She turned down a third project because it was too truthful: she did not want to make a purely biographical film.
“The great curiosity the world has about him should be fed somehow,” Ms. Guibert, 58, said recently over lunch near her home in Los Angeles. “But in the right ways.”
Now, almost 10 years after Mr. Buckley’s death, Ms. Guibert, whose life and career revolve around tending to his estate, has taken matters into her own hands. She is working with a young producer, Michelle Sy, and an even younger screenwriter and director, Brian Jun, to develop a film she plans to call “Mystery White Boy.” But whether she will have any more success getting a movie made is anything but certain.
“If I had my druthers, we wouldn’t be doing this,” she said, voicing her ambivalence about the entire undertaking. Ms. Guibert said her son was uncomfortable with his celebrity and would not have wanted any movie made about him. But her fear that someone might make a film without her cooperation, somehow sullying Mr. Buckley’s memory in the process, has motivated her to take the wheel, however reluctantly.
The tale of the on-again, off-again Buckley movie shows how even a project with a charismatic main character, a true story and a built-in audience — not to mention the makings of a popular soundtrack — can get stuck in the peculiar hell known as development.
It also shows how films involving dead musicians and artists can be among the trickiest to make: if the subject’s survivors control the rights to their music or art, they can exercise a veto merely by withholding those rights. “When a parent or a spouse has a certain memory of someone, that’s the movie they want to see,” said Dale Pollock, a former president of A&M Films. “And what’s the use of the movie if you can’t have any of the songs?”
Mr. Pollock said that he spent seven years trying to make a biographical movie about Otis Redding, but that Mr. Redding’s widow, Zelma, refused to approve any script that depicted her husband as a womanizer. “Her presence made it impossible to make a realistic film about Otis Redding,” he said. “You took this big part of what he was out of his life, and the story didn’t work.”
(Reached by phone at her shoe boutique in Macon, Ga., Ms. Redding, 64, said she was not opposed to airing a certain amount of dirty laundry in a biopic, but denied he was a womanizer, adding, “I’m not going to let anybody scandalize Otis Redding’s name.”)
The broad outlines of Mr. Buckley’s family story are what captured Hollywood’s attention. Like Tim Buckley, Jeff was a talented, handsome singer who flirted with stardom, wrestled with the temptations of the music industry and died young. He looked startlingly like his father and had the same unusually wide vocal range. Both made music that defied convention, as the music critic David Browne wrote in “Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley” (HarperEntertainment, 2001).
And yet the father was only a fleeting presence in his son’s life. Ms. Guibert, who was Tim Buckley’s high school sweetheart, was abandoned by him as a pregnant teenager and raised their son without him. Jeff met Tim only a few times before Tim’s death from a drug overdose. Still, Tim’s abbreviated but impressive career cast a long shadow over his son.
When “Grace” was released by Columbia Records, a division of Sony, critics swooned over Jeff Buckley’s beguiling falsetto and celestial sound. In a concert review at the time, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that “with his voice, a world of tumult and obsession becomes almost seductive.”
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Critics praised “Grace” and Mr. Buckley’s admirers included Paul McCartney, Bono and Jimmy Page, but the album’s sales were underwhelming. By 1997, Mr. Buckley was under pressure from Sony, which had signed him to an impressive three-album deal, to come up with a more commercial follow-up to “Grace.” He headed to Memphis in search of a creative refuge. His band members were on their way to join him the night he drowned.
His death left Ms. Guibert in the awkward position of managing his posthumous career. It is difficult not least because she has been a polarizing figure among her son’s friends and fans, critiqued and second-guessed for everything from her handling of his memorial service to the release of his music. Some of his friends even asserted that he would not have wanted her to run his estate.
And yet she spends her days policing the Internet for sales of bootlegs, maintaining a fan Web site, promoting tribute concerts and working with record companies to release more of his music. She also fields requests to use Mr. Buckley’s music on television and in films.
“This is my life’s work,” said Ms. Guibert, who shelved dreams of becoming an actress when her son was born but nonetheless retains an air of drama. “I think about this 24/7.”
She said she had not become rich as the custodian of Mr. Buckley’s legacy. Though “Grace” continues to sell as many as 1,000 albums a week domestically, Ms. Guibert said the record company was just now breaking even on it. This summer, she said, she went without hot water for several weeks, waiting to repair her water heater until the next royalty check arrived. A film, she acknowledged, would no doubt help, not least by improving sales of Mr. Buckley’s music.
At first, Ms. Guibert said, she turned away the writers and producers who asked for the right to tell her son’s story. But Mr. Pitt tempted her by helping her set up an archive of Mr. Buckley’s music and writings, including diaries and audio journals that he had recorded on cassette.
Once Mr. Pitt had Ms. Guibert’s blessing to develop a film, he hired Emma Forrest, a British novelist and journalist, to write a screenplay in the vein of the 1979 Bette Midler film “The Rose.” After all, there had been speculation that Mr. Buckley’s death was not an accident, that drugs, alcohol, or perhaps some form of mental illness had played a role.
But Ms. Guibert rejected Ms. Forrest’s two drafts.
“Her immediate response to the first draft was, ‘No, my son didn’t take drugs, he never suffered from depression,’ ” Ms. Forrest said. It was a question of competing truths, she added. Ms. Guibert’s recollections of her son differed from those of Mr. Buckley’s friends, interviewed by Ms. Forrest. Ms. Forrest said she wanted to explore the nature of genius and mine the links between music and emotional disintegration, but Ms. Guibert wanted none of it.
“We were trying to tell a story about creativity” and how it can affect people who are “exceptionally talented,” Ms. Forrest said, adding that she had struggled with mental illness herself, which she wrote about in her 2001 novel, “Thin Skin.”
Ms. Guibert said she dismissed Ms. Forrest’s screenplay in part because it was too fantastic: Ms. Forrest had her Jeff character meet the ghost of Judy Garland. She also depicted him mutilating himself, a form of mental illness that Ms. Guibert said was based too much on the screenwriter’s life and not enough on Jeff Buckley’s.
Ms. Guibert, who insists her son had no drug or alcohol problems, said he didn’t suffer from mental illness though he had the occasional panic attack and bouts of depression.
Mr. Pitt, who did not return calls for comment, eventually gave up on the project.
Mr. Buckley’s story continued to interest other filmmakers, however; no fewer than four documentaries have been made about him. And after Mr. Browne’s double biography was published, he said he was approached several times by writers and producers interested in adapting it. The book was optioned last year by Train Houston, a writer in Los Angeles who briefly interested the actor Tobey Maguire’s production company in the project.
But Ms. Guibert stood in the way. She said the script Mr. Houston wrote had a “verisimilitude” problem, and that she did not trust his approach. Mr. Houston said he had planned to learn more about Mr. Buckley once his script was sold and pushed Ms. Guibert to reconsider, but she would not budge.
“Obviously, I was not going to have any control over it,” Ms. Guibert said.
Now she is very much in charge. Through her lawyer, Ms. Guibert met her co-producer, Ms. Sy, a former director of development at Miramax Films who received an executive producer credit on “Finding Neverland.” Ms. Sy in turn linked up with Mr. Jun, 26, after his film “Steel City,” about a complicated father-son relationship, was favorably reviewed at Sundance.
On the Jeff Buckley Web site, Ms. Guibert assures his fans that Mr. Jun will not “sugarcoat or manipulate” the facts: “I’ve looked into his eyes and I know that he’s a straight shooter. There’s a depth of character to Brian, surprising in someone so young, and I have seen from his filmmaking that he has the courage and the skill to do this the way it should be done.”
Whether some sugarcoating can be avoided in a project that remains under Ms. Guibert’s watchful eye is an open question: she is, after all, his mother.
“I try to be impersonal and realistic,” Ms. Guibert said. “You know, to be a good business person about all of it. In the final analysis, I’m his mother. And when the chips are down and when our backs are to the wall, that’s it, that’s the one reason that remains. Because I’m his mother, that’s why. Because I’m still alive.”
-Greg Dulli
http://www.wishlistfoundation.org
Oh my, they dropped the leash.
Morgan Freeman/Clint Eastwood 08' for President!
"Make our day"
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Have we lost our way tonight?
Have we lost our hope to sorrow?
Feels like were all alone
Running further from what’s right
And there are no more heroes to follow
So what are we becoming?
Where did we go wrong?
And I still don't understand the need for making it at all.
I'm not a Buckley expert (fan yes, expert no); did he make 2 or 3 albums? I think he's too much of a cult icon for this film to be engaging.
And yeah you're probably right about the mother thing. What I'm most fascinated about is his spontaneity as a musician; the fact that on stage, the songs rarely sounded the same way twice and quite often, Jeff didn't tell any of his musicians what he was going to do.
I bet his mother won't tackle any of that.
- the great Sir Leo Harrison
buckley made only ONE studio album. that was 'grace'. he was getting his second together when he drowned. in fact his band were in the air en route to memphis when he walked into that river. it was apparently to be called 'my sweetheart the drunk'. hence the reason when it was released with the guidance of not only his mother and chris cornell but others it was called 'sketches for my sweetheart the drunk.'
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
She's kind of turned him into the white Tupac.
That's classic, and unfortunately true.
old music: http://www.myspace.com/slowloader
http://www.wishlistfoundation.org
Oh my, they dropped the leash.
Morgan Freeman/Clint Eastwood 08' for President!
"Make our day"
To gloss over it or allege that he didn't live with depression at times in his life is irresponsible. I didn't know the guy, but from what I've heard, he had some tough times. I'm sure the pressure from Sony to be more commercial didn't help.
Which leads me to another unrelated point. The music business is full of idiots. Anyone in their right mind would never tell a "Jeff Buckley" what he should or shouldn't do. It's the Jeff Buckley's of the world that elevate everyone else around them...make music mean something again...remind us that it's not about what the music industry has become, but what it has truly lost...and why it's in the condition it's in now.
The world had 1 Jeff Buckley, but it needed 100. I love what his msuic has meant to me over the years, and the thought of what could have been is often too much to take.
old music: http://www.myspace.com/slowloader
repeated for effect.
http://www.wishlistfoundation.org
Oh my, they dropped the leash.
Morgan Freeman/Clint Eastwood 08' for President!
"Make our day"