[Harp-L] Biopics like Cadillac Records

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Whenever I see a lousy movie I call my friends and say "at the end of your 
life you'll have gotten two extra hours if you don't waste them at this 
movie."  I got suckered into Ray and Walk the Line because they were 
screened at the Writers Guild, so I thank the posters on Harp-l for giving 
me an extra two hours which I can fill with something more satisfying, by 
warning me off Cadillac Records, which screened at the Guild last night 
without my delightful presence.

I found "Ray" and "Walk The Line" loathesome.  Inaccurate in every detail, 
perhaps the worst thing about them, and every other biopic about a musician 
I have seen, is the shorthand.  "Ahmet Ertegun" explaining to Ray in one 
sentence how to make a great Ray Charles record is only the most horrific 
of these idiotic exercises.

One only need imagine the biopic version of "learning how to play harp", 
where young Rice Miller sees an old guy in a train station playing 
harp.  Amazingly, he spies a beat up old C Hohner in the gravel, picks it 
up and tries to play - badly.  The old harp player says "That ain't how you 
do it, young 'un."  He then plays a remarkably clean version of a Sonny 
Terry solo, Rice's eyes light up and he starts playing it, too.

See The Benny Goodman Story for the same BS ala long, long ago.

I was the third writer on the Leiber & Stoller Story in 1989.  The original 
studio, one of the majors, had hired a good commercial team of writers to 
do a script and the movie was green-lighted.  L&S made sure to have a right 
of refusal on it, and they killed the picture, driving many people insane, 
because you do not kill a green-lighted movie.  But the script was another 
"Ray", only alot earlier - a complete oversimplification and distortion.

In the end, although L&S didn't want their life turned into another Benny 
Goodman Story, they also couldn't agree on what they DID want.  The more 
they confronted the difficulty of coming up with something that WASN'T 
Standard Issue Junk Musician Biopic, the more different their visions 
grew.  I lasted three months on the project before politely walking.  There 
was no way to satisfy both of them.  Many writers followed me, and 19 years 
later there is still no Leiber & Stoller story.

Biographical books about musicians are rarely written by musicians, so 
they're false to begin with.  Two hour digests of the key moments of these 
false biographies, cookie cuttered into the dreadful 'biopic' genre form -- 
gotta be a big triumph in the ending -- well what the hell is going to ring 
true about the result?

Brother Ray was an As Told To autobiography, and it's pleasant 
enough.  It's a guy telling you his good stories and leaving out the stuff 
that doesn't make him look very pleasant.  Another bio of Ray Charles came 
out a few years after that book, one that adds in the warts, and Ray 
Charles wouldn't have ever allowed that book to be made into a 
movie.  (With Ray Charles, the junky stuff really wasn't warts, compared to 
the stuff in the other book.  I wound up wishing I hadn't read it, because 
Ray Charles is like unto God for me.)

Ray and Walk The Line did business, so you can bet there'll be more 
musician biopics. They'll have nothing to do with music or the life of a 
musician.  They'll take the most lurid aspects of the lives of great 
artists and intensify them and there will be an audience for that.

The only movie I have ever seen that had anything remotely to do with the 
musician's life was - wait for it, wait for it - The Blues 
Brothers.  Remember, I said remotely, but I recognized something real in 
the not-overblown parts.

Marketers tell us that selling music to a mass audience, or selling 
anything for that matter requires that you attach a story to it, usually 
via the musician.  So Bob Dylan invented an entire biography about running 
away from home and cowboying and the circus and whatever.  That worked at 
first.  But then when he became far more exotic and interesting than that 
baloney, he allowed his real story to become the official story because it 
was actually far more impressive to realize how huge a leap he had made in 
just a few short years.  (By the way, his "Chronicles Volume 1" is by far 
the best musician's bio or autobio I have ever read.  Second volume coming 
in the Spring.)

Great music or not-so-great music, if you can attach a story to the 
musician you have an easier time selling it.  It's one thing for someone to 
say about your music "I heard this great musician that you've got to hear" 
but it's alot more viral if the person says "I heard this great musician 
and you've got to hear him because he's had this incredible life where 
he  robbed banks and he was an astronaut and he was a cowboy and also a 
pirate."

It's FUN to attach stories to music.  Try to get a baby boomer like myself 
to detach The Beatles' music from The Tale of "The Night We All Watched The 
Ed Sullivan Show."  No can do-ski.

So in the end, watching a movie about how the geniuses at Chess REALLY made 
their music and their recordings would be interesting to you and me, but 
not to the non-musician music consumer.

Thanks again for adding two hours onto the end of my life, my Harp-ler pals.

Ken




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Hear Ken Deifik's Song Collection "Music For Small Audience"
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