http://www.legacy.com/ns/news-story.aspx?t=the-many-resurrections-of-john-lennon&id=124
10/9/2010
It's been nearly 30 years since John Lennon was murdered outside a
New York apartment building. In his wake, there's been no shortage of
fictional John Lennons to take his place, with IMDB listing no fewer
than thirty-three film and TV shows featuring Lennon as a character
(not including those where he played himself). Here are some of the
more notable Lennons to appear.
Beatlemania: The Movie was already in production before John Lennon
died, but wouldn't hit screens until 1981. Based on a Broadway
musical that had been running since 1977, the widely-panned film
featured David Leon playing John Lennon. Marshall Crenshaw also
played this incarnation of Lennon, getting his big break in the music
business when he joined a touring production in 1981. Crenshaw later
also portrayed Buddy Holly in La Bamba (1987).
The Hours and the Times (1991) is among the most critically acclaimed
films to feature Lennon. The film, a fictionalized account of what
might have transpired when John Lennon accompanied manager Brian
Epstein on a holiday trip to Barcelona in 1963, won awards at
Sundance and The Berlin Film Festival. Liverpudlian Ian Hart (who you
might also know as Professor Quirell from Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone) was widely praised for his portrayal of the
young John Lennon.
Hart would reprise the role three years later in the bigger-budgeted
Backbeat (1994), which chronicled the band's formative days in rough
and tumble Hamburg, Germany. The soundtrack for the film didn't use
Beatle originals, but relied on songs the band reportedly covered in
their early years, re-recorded by a supergroup of 90s musicians that
included Dave Grohl from Nirvana, Mike Mills of R.E.M. and Thurston
Moore of Sonic Youth. The musicians strove to convey the raw,
energetic sound the Beatles had in their infancy and the film was
generally well-received. It did, however, have one formidable critic
in the form of Paul McCartney, who was annoyed to see John Lennon
singing "Long Tall Sally" rather than himself.
That same year, Forrest Gump would sit down next to John Lennon on
the Dick Cavett show, where his recollections of a trip to China
would inspire Lennon's song "Imagine." The filmmakers used archival
footage of Lennon with new dialogue dubbed by actor-musician Joe
Stefanelli, who would later form a Beatles tribute band called The
Mop Tops and appear in a 2009 Filipino production of Beatlemania.
2007 was a banner year for fictional Lennons. Chapter 27, which
chronicles the life of Mark David Chapman in the days leading up to
the murder, featured Mark Lindsay Chapman no relation in the role
of Lennon (the similarities between their names reportedly earlier
prompted NBC to drop the actor from consideration as Lennon in a 1985
made-for-TV movie). Lennon also briefly appeared in the Bob
Dylan-inspired art house movie I'm Not There, and The Beatles had a
cameo in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. In the rock star bio-pic
parody, Paul Rudd's Lennon gets in a fistfight with Jack Black's
McCartney inside the Maharishi's ashram before introducing Dewey Cox
to LSD. The theme song to the movie was written by none other than
Marshall Crenshaw, who, as earlier noted, began his musical career
portraying Lennon in the Beatlemania musical.
On the small screen, Lennon has been a more or less constant
presence, appearing in made-for-TV movies, "BBC Playhouse" episodes,
and in "Saturday Night Live" skits (played by Matthew Broderick and
Dennis Leary). Animated Lennons have surfaced in "Robot Chicken" and
a show called "House of Rock," where Lennon shares a house with a
host of other dead rock stars.
Lennon as fictional fodder shows no signs of abating, with Nowhere
Boy, a film chronicling Lennon's pre-Beatles adolescent years,
opening in U.S. theatres this weekend and a reboot of Yellow
Submarine in development for 2012. Film rights to the Alan Goldsher
mash-up novel Paul is Undead were recently snapped up, which means
audiences may also soon be able to see John Lennon and the rest of
the Fab Four depicted as brain-eating zombies (well, except for Ringo
he's a ninja).
It's no surprise that such a hugely important cultural figure
continues to inspire us, but one can't help but wonder what Lennon
himself would have made of all the posthumous tributes. "Everybody
loves you," he once said, "when you're six foot in the ground."
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