http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/17386/184322
'Dark Star' will chronicle Grateful Dead leader's early life
By Daniel Kreps
Jul 23, 2010
The story of Jerry Garcia's life before he became the heart of the
Grateful Dead is heading to the silver screen for the first time.
Director Amir Bar-Lev and his team of producers have announced plans
to turn Robert Greenfield's Dark Star: An Oral Biography on Jerry
Garcia into a big-screen biopic. Like the film Nowhere Boy, which
chronicles John Lennon's adolescence prior to joining the Beatles,
this movie will focus on Garcia's early life before he became the
figurehead of the legendary jam band. "I don't think Jerry is easily
understood. I think he's a complex human being," Greenfield tells
Rolling Stone. "After a certain point, everyone had their own vision
of Jerry. This film is about who he really was before people made him
what they wanted him to be. I think a lot of that has been lost in
the legend and the myth that has grown since his death."
Greenfield says the movie ends when Garcia leaves to join the Dead,
but it captures the period when the guitarist was working in coffee
shops and playing bluegrass, newly married with a young daughter.
Likening it to Backbeat, the film about the young Beatles, Greenfield
says, "All the seeds of his life and the formative influences that
came through his music with the Dead everything is there, the
childhood, the death of his father, the way he grew up. You see him
at the crossroads of his life." He adds that production could begin
as early as next year.
Greenfield, a Rolling Stone contributor, is well versed in
Haight-Ashbury psychedelia, having cowritten Bill Graham Presents: My
Life Inside Rock and Out and written Timothy Leary: A Biography. Dark
Star charts Garcia's life via interviews with his friends, family and
bandmates. Since the film will take place prior to Garcia's Dead
days, Greenfield said it's unlikely the film will feature the band's
music, opting instead for a soundtrack filled with "bluegrass, folk
ballads and jugband music" that was influential at the time. Bob Weir
and songwriter Robert Hunter will be portrayed in the film.
"This picture will be psychedelic in the best sense," Greenfield
says, explaining that the storytelling will not be completely linear.
The film's title has not yet been officially announced, but
Greenfield tells RS the film will be titled Dark Star. "The reason
we're focusing on this part of his life is [he was] an artist
struggling to find himself. During the acid revolution, when he began
using LSD, it changed the way he played his music," Greenfield says.
"He did things on electric guitar that weren't done before not
because he had taken LSD but because of all the influences he
absorbed throughout his life. It's an accident of history and where
he was in time."
Screenwriter Topper Lilien, whose last big-screen writing credit was
2000's live-action Dungeons & Dragons, will pen the script. Bar-Lev
is a noted documentary director and producer who previously worked on
the post-Katrina New Orleans doc Trouble the Water as co-producer and
more recently The Tillman Story as director. "Amir is a remarkable
guy. He knows the Dead very well," Greenfield tells RS. "He knows
their music. He is a documentary filmmaker. He's got the right
sensibility; he really gets what the piece is about and what Jerry is
about. He certainly understands what the Dead were about. He strikes
me as a really good choice."
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