Thanks to Outkast’s Andre 3000 who saves us from writing the “why do rock biopics get announced and then never happen,” piece. You could call this the rock-biopic public service announcement that would kind of go like this:
Dear Audiences,
Generally there are 10,0000 too many cooks when it comes to typical rock-biopic (especially if they’re dead). Too many people own to many pieces of the pie whether its song publishing, record labels, rights to ones story and family members (usually squabbling) that have to independently approve every little matter. This is why most rock biopics take forever to get made (see the floundering Janis Joplin biopic for one current example).
3000 puts it like this: “The funny thing with the biopics , I mean, it’s the same thing with ‘Hendrix’,” Andre told MTV. “It’s kinda like, until you are on set doing it you can’t say what’s going on, because everybody wants to do the movie, but there are so many things that go into a biopic.”
As for the state of the reported Sammy Davis Jr. biopic “Sammy & Kim” he was in talks to do? “The Sammy Davis Jr. movie, I think, is in re-writes right now,” he said, sounding not very optimistic about his involvement in the project. “That wasn’t, like, a done deal.”
Meanwhile, “Hairspray” star Elijah Kelly insists that his Sammy biopic is moving forward. We’ll believe it when we see it.