NEW YORK - What is it about musicians that makes them such popular subjects for the movies? Walk the Line, the new Johnny Cash biopic, is the third film this year to adapt the life of a music star for the big screen. In the past two years, no fewer that six musician biopics have graced U.S. theaters, spanning the worlds of rock, rap, country, show tunes and soul.
Obviously, much of the appeal lies in the music itself, especially the recreation of legendary concerts and recordings. (Walk the Line begins with Cash's 1968 performance at Folsom prison.) But musicians, being temperamental people, are also famous for getting into trouble, and Hollywood isn't above rummaging through their dark pasts for potential Oscar-night clips. Drugs, alcohol, infidelity, profligate spending, spousal abuse and suicide have become biopic cliches.
Common though they are, biopics seldom achieve blockbuster status. Walk the Line debuted at second place this weekend at $22.4 million, far behind the first-place finisher, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which grossed $101 million. Recent flops include Kevin Spacey's Bobby Darin film, Beyond the Sea, which grossed $6.6 million, and Gus Van Sant's Last Days, about Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain, which brought in less than a half million.
The musician biopic can assume many forms. There's the straightforward cradle-to-grave approach of Ray; the thinly fictionalized accounts of 8 Mile or Last Days; and perhaps most strangely, the meta-biographical approach of Beyond the Sea and De-Lovely, in which the subject watches his own life pass before his eyes.
Notoriously difficult to produce, musician biopics demand patience and endurance from their makers. Walk the Line took 12 years from initial conception to production, according to Lou Robin, Cash's long-time manager. Ray, which was the brainchild of producer-director Taylor Hackford, took more than 15 years to get off the ground. Chief among the challenges are obtaining rights to the artist's life story and music, which can be a time consuming affair involving legions of lawyers.
To help streamline the process, many biopics have the actors actually perform the music instead of lip-synching or air-guitaring their performances. This is a popular choice that eliminates the need to license the original masters from the record label or the artist's estate, according to Quinn Heraty, a New York-based entertainment lawyer. For Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix (Cash) and Reese Witherspoon (June Carter) took voice lessons and trained for months on the guitar and autoharp.
The biopic machine keeps on rolling. Coming up: a Bob Dylan movie from director Todd Haynes, in which different actors play the mythic singer at different points in his career. There's also a film based on the life of counter-culture icon Janis Joplin, who will be played on screen by rock star Pink. Also in various states of preproduction are biopics on two deceased rappers, the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur.