Bio-pics

A Life in Pictures

Ellen Cheshire

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231850681
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Bio-pics: A Life in Pictures offers a series of case studies which throw light on this most unique of genres. Is the bio-pic a genre in its own right? Or are such films merely footnotes in other more traditional genres such as the western or costume drama, depending on the historical figure under scrutiny. Unlike other genre forms bio-pics seemingly share no familiar iconography, codes or conventions. They can be set anywhere and at any time. What links them is quite simply that the films depict the life of an 'important' person. Through a carefully selected range of thematically linked (English-language) bio-pics released since 1990 this book explores key issues surrounding their resurgence, narrative structure, production, subject representation or misrepresentation, and critical response. The films under discussion are grouped around a profession (writers, singers, politicians, sportsmen, criminals, artists) allowing for comparisons to be drawn in approaches to similar subject matter.

1 THE SOUND OF MUSIC: SINGERS AND MUSICIANS TAKE CENTRE STAGE

Cinema is fascinated with rock stars. The trajectory of most music industry careers is the kind of rise and fall recommended by both Aristotle’s Poetics and any cheap screenwriting manual you care to pick up. Hollywood likes large stories and mythic characters, which rockers by necessity are.

– Toby Litt, The New Statesman (2007)

The writing and performing of music is both a visual and aural experience, the music’s power driving the narrative forward with both diegetic and nondiegetic uses. Some films have required the actor to recreate the sounds of the singer in question: Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin in Beyond the Sea (2004) and Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line whereas others have mimed to actual recordings: Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose and Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in Ray – although he did so with his own piano playing. Some performances are so pitch perfect, such as Sam Riley as Ian Curtis in Control, that fans have questioned the actor’s recreation, believing it to be mimed. Megan Good, vying for the coveted role of Whitney Houston, said, ‘It’s not about singing like her. You’d have to use her voice, you’d have to use her essence’ (quoted in Anon. 2014). Music-based bio-pics were a popular sub-genre of the Hollywood Golden Age and have remained so. They provide a built-in fan base and opportunities for lucrative tie-in soundtrack sales.

The narrative structure of these music bio-pics can be seen as offering a contradiction to other emotion-driven dramas. In principle, the purpose of a narrative is to get from the beginning to the end of a story with the least amount of fuss. However, in a music bio-pic the narrative is constantly being interrupted by the songs. Within the bio-pic, the music can either be used on the soundtrack, as a work-in-progress, a fantasy sequence, re-viewed or as a finished performed musical routine. Sometimes these are used to support or clarify the subject’s emotional status or as pure entertainment.

The three films explored here are Ray, Beyond the Sea and I’m Not There exploring the lives of three twentieth-century singers: Ray Charles, Bobby Darin and Bob Dylan. The narrative structure of the latter two relies on the audience having an appreciation of its generic predecessors, the more traditional cradle-to-grave approach as demostrated by the first.

Ray (2004)

Director: Taylor Hackford

Screenwriter: James L. White

Starring: Jamie Foxx (Ray Charles), Kerry Washington (Della Bea Washington) and Regina King (Margie Hendricks)

Subject: American musician, singer-songwriter and composer Ray Charles (Ray Charles Robinson, 1930 – 2004)

Ray Charles’s son first approached Taylor Hackford in 1989 with the idea of turning his father’s turbulent life into film. It would take fifteen years for the film to be financed. Hackford says, ‘You have to understand I heard everything, from “nobody remembers Ray Charles,” to “young people aren’t interested,” “African-American films don’t sell overseas,” and “biopics belong on television”’ (quoted in Hamilos 2005).

The film’s budget of $31 million was entirely raised by American entrepreneur, religious conservative and Ray Charles fan Philip Anschutz. He had initially requested that the film not feature any sex, swearing or drug taking. Hackford said, ‘but this is a man who was a heroin addict for 20 years and slept with a different woman every night. I walked away from the project not once but twice, because [Anschutz] now had the rights and he was determined to make sure that it couldn’t be an R-rated movie’ (ibid.).

It was Ray Charles himself who convinced Hackford to find creative ways to show the darker underbelly of his life within the constraints imposed by Anschutz. Hackford rationalised that ‘artists have been censored for centuries and still were able to communicate sex and everything else. It is ironic that a film like this should have been funded by a moral conservative. But he was straight about his beliefs and, once we agreed, he left me alone. That’s much better than having somebody who believes they’ve got an artistic point of view, who tries to meddle with you’ (ibid.).

The Charles family were involved throughout the development, filming and promotion process. Ray Charles saw a completed version of the film, but died before its release. Despite Hackford’s belief that, ‘in the end it’s a sexy film and a tough film’ (ibid.), David Ritz, co-author of Charles’s autobiography, Brother Ray: Ray Charles’s Own Story (2004), accused Hackford of sentimentalising the story and ignoring or downplaying the more unsavoury aspects of his life.

The film covers thirty years of Charles’s life, from the mid-1930s when aged seven he witnesses his brother’s death and goes blind, to the mid1960s when he refused to play to a segregated audience in Georgia.

It opens in 1948 with the 17-year-old Ray boarding a greyhound bus to Seattle to seek a career as a nightclub pianist. The film follows a familiar rags-to-riches story as Charles’s career takes off, his musical legacy displayed in performances of some his classics from the early solo hit ‘Doin’ the Run Around’, to his popular hits ‘Hit the Road Jack’ and ‘Unchain my Heart’, to the song that changed history, ‘Georgia on My Mind’. Jamie Foxx, who lost 30lbs for the role, was a classically trained pianist and plays his own piano throughout, whilst lip-synching to the Charles originals.

Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in Ray (2004)

The film does not shy away from the darker side showing Charles as a flawed man – cheating on his wife; humiliating his loyal friends; dumping Atlantic Records who nurtured his talent and turned him into a star; and his addiction to heroin. As Andy Gill writes, ‘Ray manages to present its subject as a complex, multi-faceted character, capable of both brilliant musical innovation and a ruthless attitude that sometimes bordered on cruelty (2004: 58).

Hackford’s decision to employ flashbacks to expose the childhood tragedies that plague the adult man psychologically underpins the narrative. Flashbacks of Charles’s poor upbringing, his young brother’s death, his sudden blindness, being sent to a special school for the blind and his mother’s death soon afterwards, are incorporated into the 1948–1966 timeline as incidents in the present recall tragedies from his past. Showing that despite his successes, these personal demons haunted Ray until he sought solace in heroin and womanising (he fathered twelve children out of wedlock).

By stopping the film two-thirds of the way through Charles’s life and at a moment of triumph (having kicked his heroin habit), it endorses Charles’s view of his life. In an interview shortly before his death on the film’s release, he said, ‘I’ve had some wonderful things happen to me, but I’ve had some pretty dramatic things to happen to me, too. I would like people to know that you can recover from a lot of adversity that you might have in your life if you keep pressing on … In other words, you don’t give up just because you get knocked down a few times’ (quoted in Gill 2004). The omission of Charles’s last forty years fails to show his continued womanising (leading to his divorce) and decline in commercial popularity.

The film was a success at the box office, earning $20 million over its opening weekend. It went on to make $75 million. It was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture, and won two: Best Actor for Jamie Foxx and Best Sound. The last album Charles recorded was held back to coincide with the film’s release.

The critical response to the film was largely positive with critics highlighting Foxx’s uncanny recreation of Ray Charles, for example:

Jamie Foxx suggests the complexities of Ray Charles in a great, exuberant performance. What [he] gets just right is the physical Ray Charles, and what an extrovert he was. Foxx so accurately reflects my own images and memories of Charles that I abandoned thoughts of how much ‘like’ Charles he was and just accepted him as Charles, and got on with the story. (Ebert 2004a)

Its detractors questioned the tone, and the judicious selection and presentation of the major life incidents:

It’s got that award-friendly disabled angle and a cheery thumbs up to race relations, as well as bags of personal hell (heroin, adultery, flashbacks) that always seems to go hand in hand with professional virtuosity. While the music in Ray is ear-tingingly good, the biggest noise is the scratch of boxes being ticked. (Shoard 2005)

Beyond the Sea (2004)

Director: Kevin Spacey

Screenwriters: Kevin Spacey and Lewis Colick

Starring: Kevin Spacey (Bobby Darin) and Kate Bosworth (Sandra Dee)

Subject: American singer and actor Bobby Darin (Waldon Robert Cassotto, 1936–1973).

This was a personal project for Kevin Spacey who was a big fan of Bobby Darin and wanted to reclaim him as the great star he had been, but was now largely forgotten in favour of other entertainers of that period. Spacey had featured Darin numbers in the previous film he had starred in, Midnight in the Garden of Good of Evil (1997). When the rights became available, after an earlier aborted film helmed by Barry Levinson fell through, Spacey worked with Darin’s son Dodd to acquire them.

Beyond the Sea depicts Darin’s childhood, rise to success in both the music and film industries during the 1950s and 1960s, his marriage/ break-up with Sandra Dee and his death aged 37.

The film does not employ a straightforward narrative structure, favouring a more knowing deconstruction and examination of a ‘traditional’ biopic: a film within a film. The film opens as many music bio-pics do, at a moment of glory, Darin at the peak of his career on stage at the Copacabana nightclub. The camera pulls back to reveal that we are actually on a sound stage. The adult Darin is confronted by himself as a young boy, arguing that he’s ‘gotten it all wrong’.

The narrative moves back and forth in time, with versions of his childhood and adult self, articulating a schism Darin himself felt. Spacey stated, ‘Bobby Darin said he always felt like two different people. That Waldon Robert Cassotto spent half his life trying to become Bobby Darin, and Bobby Darin spent the rest of his life trying to get back to Waldon Robert Cassotto’ (quoted in Murray 2004). The question of identity is central to both the film and Darin himself, who discovered late in life that his ‘sister’ was really his mother, and that his ‘parents’ were his grandparents.

This emotional crisis is shown through the older and younger versions of Darin interacting with one another. In the film’s closing number, after Darin’s death, the two dance, within an ensemble of Darins. Spacey said, ‘Bobby went off the rails, and I think it took him awhile to put it back together. That’s sort of what I try to do in the last dance sequence … you have all of these representative Bobby’s, all these dancers, and they all become one. Finally he’s sort of figured out how to put it together’ (ibid.).

The traditional beat points of the rise and successes in film, music and television career are all covered. His poor health as a child becomes a recurring motif as ill-health in adulthood plagues his work and personal life. His marriage to the much younger film star Sandra Dee and their marriage break-up, is shown in the style of a Hollywood movie. When he marries Dee he jokingly tells this bubbly blonde-haired all-American girl, ‘You’re not Audrey Hepburn’. Later, when they are filming in Italy, they are seen riding vespas à la Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday (1953).

The film’s examination of the genre is further revealed when, as part of Darin’s success, there are plans to film ‘a self-portrait on film’, leading to discussions of how it should be structured, which adds a pleasing post-modern dimension highlighting and exposing some of the problems inherent in the genre. Perhaps, as a knowing nod to Spacey’s actual age of 45 (playing a man who died at 37), there are quips about Darin himself being too old to play the screen version of himself. Darin’s father/grandfather, Charlie Cassotto Maffia (Bob Hoskins), responds, ‘How can you to be too old to play yourself?’

Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin and Kate Bosworth as Sandra Dee in Beyond the Sea (2004)

There are arguments as to how the film within the film should start. The first idea tried is that of Darin’s talent manager, Stephen Blauner (John Goodman): ‘It should start with a kid playing Bobby as a child – a mini version and he’s a method actor.’ This version starts and is then scrapped. ‘So how do you think we should start?’ asks Blauner of Darin. ‘If you want some truth. I’ll give you some truth.’ Darin clicks his fingers. ‘This is where would should start, on the street where I grew up. Back to the beginning.’ The older Darin is now watching the childhood scenes, much like Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Darin (in voice over): ‘… a world I could live in – the whole street dancing – they didn’t dance down the street like that – it was just a fantasy sequence. Memories are moonbeams, we can do with them what we want.’ This line about moonbeams and fantasy dancing sequences urges the audience to accept this version of Darin’s life primarily as entertainment with the factual document second.

The film received mixed reviews when it opened, with critics focusing on Spacey’s complete involvement in the project and his obsession with the now all-but-forgotten Darin:

This vainglorious biopic about Bobby Darin is really about what the ‘60s pop singer and actor means to Kevin Spacey, who co-produces, co-writes, directs, stars in, dances and sings his way through this movie. To be fair, Spacey’s rendition of Darin is right on the imitative money. He sings the entire soundtrack, almost nuance for nuance, like Darin. But the movie never goes beyond Spacey’s parlor tricks. (Thomson 2004)

The movie is an extraordinary one-man show: Mr. Spacey is not only the star and a producer, but also director, co-writer and leader of a 19-piece band that will tour nine cities, backing his Darin act. Mr. Spacey, with the help of seven toupees and the make-up team from The Lord of the Rings, essentially becomes Bobby Darin in the film. (McDougal 2004)

The movie possesses genuine feeling because Spacey is there with Darin during all the steps of this journey, up and down, all the way into death. Not all stories have happy endings. Not all lives have third acts. (Ebert 2004b)

I’m Not There (2007)

Director: Todd Haynes

Screenwriters: Todd Haynes and Oren Moverman

Starring: Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Wishaw, Christian Bale and Marcus Carl Franklin as versions of Bob Dylan

Subject: American musician, singer-songwriter, artist and writer Bob Dylan (Robert Allen Zimmerman, 1941–present)

The poster proclaims that ‘Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Wishaw are all Bob Dylan’, clearly promoting I’m Not There as a ‘Bob Dylan film’. An on-screen disclaimer states that I’m Not There is ‘inspired by the music and the many lives of Bob Dylan’....

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Life in Pictures
• 1. The Sound of Music: Singers and Musicians Take Centre Stage
• 2. Hollywoodland: Actors and Directors as Portrayed by Actors and Directors
• 3. Prick Up Your Ears: Now a Word on Writers
• 4. Through the Eyes of a Painter: The Art of the On-screen Artist
• 5. A Winner Never Quits: The Powerful Force of Sporting Biographies
• 6. Awakenings: Voices from the Ivory Towers of Academia
• 7. Into the Storm: The Politics of Political Bio-pics
• 8. A Royal Affair: The Majesty of Royal Representations
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index