While a lot of band fund their retirements by leasing out their music to anyone who’ll pay cash to use it, The Beatles have been very careful with which films they’ve allowed to use their music.
While the odd song has popped up and there was the musical Across The Universe, generally it’s been tough to get McCartney, Starr, and the estates of Harrison and Lennon to allow use of the original tunes. And when it comes the film actually about the Beatles, they’ve completely refused – which has caused issues for movies such as Backbeat and Nowhere Boy.
However now a new biopic of the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, is planned, and it’ll be the first film that’s won the right to use the Beatles’ actual music, according to Deadline.
This is the latest of a series of attempts to make a movie about Epstein. In 2009 a movie with a screenplay by Tony Gittelson foundered in 2009, while in April 2012 there were reports that Tom Hanks was producing a film about Epstein with Benedict Cumberbatch attached to star, but we haven’t heard anything about that since.
This new film has a script Tony-winning producer Vivek J. Tiwary (Green Day’s American Idiot, Mel Brooks’ The Producers), based on his own forthcoming graphic novel with art by Andrew C. Robinson and cartoonist Kyle Baker. Tiwary will also produce alongside Oscar-winner Bruce Cohen (American Beauty, Milk).
Epstein signed the iconic band back in 1961. He initially had difficulty getting a label to take them, before he managed to launch them to international superstar status. While he’s best remembered for his relationship to the Liverpudlians, he also managed the likes of Cilla Black and Gerry & the Pacemakers.
Epstein was also a closeted homosexual, whose sexuality was completely concealed from the public, although it was an open secret amongst his friends and associates. It’s little surprise it was kept secret, as homosexuality was still illegal in the UK at the time. He’s also said to have had an ‘almost’ love affair with John Lennon, which was never consummated (at least that’s how Lennon put it). Epstein battled addictions with drugs and gambling, and tragically died of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills in 1967, just one month before homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales.
The current hope is to start shooting in 2014.
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