jeff buckley Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Since we learned that the Jeff Buckley biopic is still in the works this past June, the news has evoked a myriad of responses. There are those that love the idea, those who loathe even the thought of Robert Pattinson taking the role, those who protest, and even those who want the gig for themselves. Personally, I've liked the idea of Pattinson -- not for his acting, but for his look and musical talents. Any Buckley biopic should have Jeff's music sung by himself, no covers allowed. But they still need the musical talent -- the man who can look wholly natural performing, and who has the talents to play the guitar as Buckley did, freeing any need for careful cuts and stand-in musical hands.

But if the thought of a Twilight actor is too much to bear, there's a Canadian actor who has somehow grown into the spitting image of Jeff Buckley over the last five years. (To be fair, some commenters named this actor back in June, but I quickly forgot about it, imagining the boy actor I first knew, and not the man he had become.) Mark Rendall.

Last Wednesday, I threw on Jeff Buckley - Live in Chicago and got to work. One of the times I glanced at the TV screen, a thought occurred to me: Robert Pattinson could pull off a decent Jeff Buckley. He's only a few years younger than the musician was during the creation of Grace; he's a got a slew of musical talents; and has a similar look. Heck, I even tweeted about it. Only a few days later, in a turn that taps into my collective conscience/coincidence question, there's a mass of buzz about a Buckley biopic.

ABC News reports that Pattinson and James Franco are in a showdown to play the musician in the upcoming biopic. There's not much beef to this account, and they get it wrong that "Hallelujah" was released posthumously (it was on Grace), so it doesn't seem definitive. However, an older news release down under explains things in detail. The Sunday Mail reports that Buckley's mother Mary Guibert is overseeing the project, with producers Michelle Sy (Finding Neverland) and Orion Williams (Control !!) and screenwriter Ryan Jaffe (the less-promising The Rocker). (With the inclusion of Sy and Guibert, this must be the project that began cooking three years ago, although writer/director Brian Jun is not mentioned.)

Way back in June (yeah, that's light years ago in Internet time), Martha told you all about the efforts to finally make a movie about musician Jeff Buckley, who went for an evening swim in the Wolf River Marina fully clothed in 1997 and drowned. Mary Guibert, Buckley's mother, has long insisted that Buckley's death was accidental and was not related to drugs, alcohol, or mental illness; an autopsy showed no illegal drugs in his system at the time of his death.

Hollywood has been interested in making a film about Buckley for years. Brad Pitt, according to a story in today's New York Times, once said that he was "obsessed" with Buckley's music, and tried more than once to get a film project about the late singer's life going; Pitt was thwarted by Guibert, who has struggled for years to not have her son's life, work and death distilled into a two-hour movie. She previously rejected scripts that portrayed her son as depressed and using drugs, and that delved too far into fantasy -- one rejected script by Emma Forrest (who also wrote the screen play for the Bette Midler film The Rose), along the lines of the film The Rose, had Buckley meeting the ghost of Judy Garland.

Just like they do his fellow gorgeous, troubled musician Chet Baker, Hollywood finds the late Jeff Buckley irresistible. Though the first effort to make a movie of his life seems to have foundered (the rights to Dream Brother: The Lives & Music of Jeff & Tim Buckley were purchased last year, but no move has been made on the film), a second attempt is now being made, this one with the involvement of Mary Guibert, Buckley's own mother. Still untitled, the film will be produced by Guibert and Michelle Sy (who executive-produced Finding Neverland, one of the effective biopics that convinced Guibert her son's story could be told successfully on screen) and will be written and directed by Brian Jun, whose recent success at Sundance with Steel City brought him to Guibert and Sy's attention.

Though I know he was a very talented guy (and actually saw him in concert once), the only details I know about Buckley's life are that he drowned, and that his dad was Tim Buckley, so I don't have any particularly strong feelings about this news. Buckley fans, what do you guys think? Travesty waiting to happen, or a chance for the rest of us to get sucked into your obsession?