for those of you interested here is an article from today's NY Post.

a link >> http://www.nytimes.com/20...ref=movies" target="_blank"> http://www.nytimes.com/20...ref=movies



Hollywood’s Knocking but Mom Guards the Door

WHEN the 30-year-old singer Jeff Buckley, best known for his haunting 1994 album “Grace,” walked into a Memphis river fully clothed in 1997, he wrote a Hollywood-ready end to a brief but compelling life story.

Soon the movie people came calling, wooing his mother, Mary Guibert, for the rights to tell his story and to use his music in the telling. But Ms. Guibert, wary of letting her son’s memory be exploited, was a tough customer.

Brad Pitt, who at one point had called himself obsessed with Mr. Buckley’s music, struggled for two years to make a film inspired by his life. But Ms. Guibert rejected the scripts he developed as straying too far from reality. She shot down another effort, in part because the screenwriter imagined a scene with Mr. Buckley on LSD, hallucinating a meeting with his father, Tim Buckley, the 1960’s folk and jazz troubadour, who died in 1975 (and whom Jeff barely knew). She turned down a third project because it was too truthful: she did not want to make a purely biographical film.

“The great curiosity the world has about him should be fed somehow,” Ms. Guibert, 58, said recently over lunch near her home in Los Angeles. “But in the right ways.”

Now, almost 10 years after Mr. Buckley’s death, Ms. Guibert, whose life and career revolve around tending to his estate, has taken matters into her own hands. She is working with a young producer, Michelle Sy, and an even younger screenwriter and director, Brian Jun, to develop a film she plans to call “Mystery White Boy.” But whether she will have any more success getting a movie made is anything but certain.

“If I had my druthers, we wouldn’t be doing this,” she said, voicing her ambivalence about the entire undertaking. Ms. Guibert said her son was uncomfortable with his celebrity and would not have wanted any movie made about him. But her fear that someone might make a film without her cooperation, somehow sullying Mr. Buckley’s memory in the process, has motivated her to take the wheel, however reluctantly.

The tale of the on-again, off-again Buckley movie shows how even a project with a charismatic main character, a true story and a built-in audience — not to mention the makings of a popular soundtrack — can get stuck in the peculiar hell known as development.

It also shows how films involving dead musicians and artists can be among the trickiest to make: if the subject’s survivors control the rights to their music or art, they can exercise a veto merely by withholding those rights. “When a parent or a spouse has a certain memory of someone, that’s the movie they want to see,” said Dale Pollock, a former president of A&M Films. “And what’s the use of the movie if you can’t have any of the songs?”

Mr. Pollock said that he spent seven years trying to make a biographical movie about Otis Redding, but that Mr. Redding’s widow, Zelma, refused to approve any script that depicted her husband as a womanizer. “Her presence made it impossible to make a realistic film about Otis Redding,” he said. “You took this big part of what he was out of his life, and the story didn’t work.”

(Reached by phone at her shoe boutique in Macon, Ga., Ms. Redding, 64, said she was not opposed to airing a certain amount of dirty laundry in a biopic, but denied he was a womanizer, adding, “I’m not going to let anybody scandalize Otis Redding’s name.”)

The broad outlines of Mr. Buckley’s family story are what captured Hollywood’s attention. Like Tim Buckley, Jeff was a talented, handsome singer who flirted with stardom, wrestled with the temptations of the music industry and died young. He looked startlingly like his father and had the same unusually wide vocal range. Both made music that defied convention, as the music critic David Browne wrote in “Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley” (HarperEntertainment, 2001).

And yet the father was only a fleeting presence in his son’s life. Ms. Guibert, who was Tim Buckley’s high school sweetheart, was abandoned by him as a pregnant teenager and raised their son without him. Jeff met Tim only a few times before Tim’s death from a drug overdose. Still, Tim’s abbreviated but impressive career cast a long shadow over his son.

When “Grace” was released by Columbia Records, a division of Sony, critics swooned over Jeff Buckley’s beguiling falsetto and celestial sound. In a concert review at the time, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that “with his voice, a world of tumult and obsession becomes almost seductive.”

Critics praised “Grace” and Mr. Buckley’s admirers included Paul McCartney, Bono and Jimmy Page, but the album’s sales were underwhelming. By 1997, Mr. Buckley was under pressure from Sony, which had signed him to an impressive three-album deal, to come up with a more commercial follow-up to “Grace.” He headed to Memphis in search of a creative refuge. His band members were on their way to join him the night he drowned.

His death left Ms. Guibert in the awkward position of managing his posthumous career. It is difficult not least because she has been a polarizing figure among her son’s friends and fans, critiqued and second-guessed for everything from her handling of his memorial service to the release of his music. Some of his friends even asserted that he would not have wanted her to run his estate.

And yet she spends her days policing the Internet for sales of bootlegs, maintaining a fan Web site, promoting tribute concerts and working with record companies to release more of his music. She also fields requests to use Mr. Buckley’s music on television and in films.

“This is my life’s work,” said Ms. Guibert, who shelved dreams of becoming an actress when her son was born but nonetheless retains an air of drama. “I think about this 24/7.”

She said she had not become rich as the custodian of Mr. Buckley’s legacy. Though “Grace” continues to sell as many as 1,000 albums a week domestically, Ms. Guibert said the record company was just now breaking even on it. This summer, she said, she went without hot water for several weeks, waiting to repair her water heater until the next royalty check arrived. A film, she acknowledged, would no doubt help, not least by improving sales of Mr. Buckley’s music.

At first, Ms. Guibert said, she turned away the writers and producers who asked for the right to tell her son’s story. But Mr. Pitt tempted her by helping her set up an archive of Mr. Buckley’s music and writings, including diaries and audio journals that he had recorded on cassette.

Once Mr. Pitt had Ms. Guibert’s blessing to develop a film, he hired Emma Forrest, a British novelist and journalist, to write a screenplay in the vein of the 1979 Bette Midler film “The Rose.” After all, there had been speculation that Mr. Buckley’s death was not an accident, that drugs, alcohol, or perhaps some form of mental illness had played a role.

But Ms. Guibert rejected Ms. Forrest’s two drafts.

“Her immediate response to the first draft was, ‘No, my son didn’t take drugs, he never suffered from depression,’ ” Ms. Forrest said. It was a question of competing truths, she added. Ms. Guibert’s recollections of her son differed from those of Mr. Buckley’s friends, interviewed by Ms. Forrest. Ms. Forrest said she wanted to explore the nature of genius and mine the links between music and emotional disintegration, but Ms. Guibert wanted none of it.

“We were trying to tell a story about creativity” and how it can affect people who are “exceptionally talented,” Ms. Forrest said, adding that she had struggled with mental illness herself, which she wrote about in her 2001 novel, “Thin Skin.”

Ms. Guibert said she dismissed Ms. Forrest’s screenplay in part because it was too fantastic: Ms. Forrest had her Jeff character meet the ghost of Judy Garland. She also depicted him mutilating himself, a form of mental illness that Ms. Guibert said was based too much on the screenwriter’s life and not enough on Jeff Buckley’s.

Ms. Guibert, who insists her son had no drug or alcohol problems, said he didn’t suffer from mental illness though he had the occasional panic attack and bouts of depression.

Mr. Pitt, who did not return calls for comment, eventually gave up on the project.

Mr. Buckley’s story continued to interest other filmmakers, however; no fewer than four documentaries have been made about him. And after Mr. Browne’s double biography was published, he said he was approached several times by writers and producers interested in adapting it. The book was optioned last year by Train Houston, a writer in Los Angeles who briefly interested the actor Tobey Maguire’s production company in the project.

But Ms. Guibert stood in the way. She said the script Mr. Houston wrote had a “verisimilitude” problem, and that she did not trust his approach. Mr. Houston said he had planned to learn more about Mr. Buckley once his script was sold and pushed Ms. Guibert to reconsider, but she would not budge.

“Obviously, I was not going to have any control over it,” Ms. Guibert said.

Now she is very much in charge. Through her lawyer, Ms. Guibert met her co-producer, Ms. Sy, a former director of development at Miramax Films who received an executive producer credit on “Finding Neverland.” Ms. Sy in turn linked up with Mr. Jun, 26, after his film “Steel City,” about a complicated father-son relationship, was favorably reviewed at Sundance.

On the Jeff Buckley Web site, Ms. Guibert assures his fans that Mr. Jun will not “sugarcoat or manipulate” the facts: “I’ve looked into his eyes and I know that he’s a straight shooter. There’s a depth of character to Brian, surprising in someone so young, and I have seen from his filmmaking that he has the courage and the skill to do this the way it should be done.”

Whether some sugarcoating can be avoided in a project that remains under Ms. Guibert’s watchful eye is an open question: she is, after all, his mother.

“I try to be impersonal and realistic,” Ms. Guibert said. “You know, to be a good business person about all of it. In the final analysis, I’m his mother. And when the chips are down and when our backs are to the wall, that’s it, that’s the one reason that remains. Because I’m his mother, that’s why. Because I’m still alive.”
[Edited 10/29/06 11:27am]

sounds like it will be crap with the mom in charge..

prettymansson said:

i can't imagine liking the film if only because i can't see the reason to make it. that woman is definately a terror and has no business being on board as producer. yet another way she's fulfilling her own stifled ambitions thru her dead son and his music. i loved the "she maintains an air of drama" comment.

damn.. well forget a good movie comin out...


she is on the defense about everything..

Sdldawn said:

forever, for always!!

wavesofbliss said:

She's already pimped his legacy quite a bit as it is (which I'm kinda torn on because on one hand, I love some of the stuff that has seen the light of day because of her) but she needs to realize that the Jeff that she knew must have been quite different from the way he really was.

Still, Jeff is probably spinning in his grave over her releasing Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk (and I LOVE that record, but I know he would have cringed at its release)

i agree that her handling of his work has been largely quesitonable but a couple of good things hav come out of it. for example the Live in Chicago video was nice. The Sin-E stuff would have come out eventually bcos Columbia had already made allowences for that sorta thing inthe original contract.

i think he'd be fine with the second disc and some of the first. the problem w/ buckley is that he could never be objective about his own work. Andy Wallace, his engineer on Grace said the same thing.

plus, shes holding out on a lot of the more interseting stuff that people know is around and want to hear. the stuff i put up earlier in the year was not leaked by "the estate". it's part of a compilation of stuff that many buckley fans have and or have known about since before his death and in some cases just after.

but then she thinks the word bitch is anachronistic for
B- being
I -in
T- total
C- control
H- honey!


and that's a quote from the woman herself.