TORONTO — On Saturday night, John Ridley stepped onto the red carpet at the film festival here with the future of a beloved movie genre — much of it, anyway — on his shoulders.
Mr. Ridley had arrived for the premiere screening of “All Is by My Side,” a music biography, which he wrote and directed, about the young Jimi Hendrix.
It is a small, indie film that had come to the Toronto International Film Festival in search of a distributor. So the long lines that wrapped around the block to get into the screening were good news for Mr. Ridley and his backers.
“A film like this does not happen by accident,” Mr. Ridley told the assembled fans. Their presence offered hope for what has seemed to be a faltering marriage between film biography and music.
It has been a while since anyone released a musical biopic that almost anyone can remember. “The Sapphires,” about Australian girl singers who were a hit during the Vietnam War, took in just $2.5 million at the United States box office in 2012. And it was the biggest music biography that year.
Part of the significance of Mr. Ridley’s movie is that no major studio or affiliate has attempted the genre since 2009, when Fox Searchlight released “Notorious,” about Notorious B.I.G., and Paramount and DreamWorks opened “The Soloist,” about a homeless cellist, both to modest success. (Universal Pictures last month said it would release a James Brown biography, to be directed by Tate Taylor, in October 2014.)
Music biographies have in recent years been derailed by mishaps — the latest being Sacha Baron Cohen’s July exit from a film about Queen because of differences with the band. In addition, the potential revenue from the sale of soundtracks has decreased as music sales have softened. And flashy musical features like “Les Misérables” last year have gained more traction with studios, again at the biopic’s expense.
Despite the obstacles, Mr. Ridley and others never stopped knocking on the door.
“This got to be a story I was so passionate about, I could not give it up,” Mr. Ridley said. His conviction prompted him to persist with the project even though it was turned down by executives who didn’t share his fascination with what he calls “the emotional velocity” of Hendrix’s birth as a rock artist. Mr. Ridley spoke recently at an open-air cafe in Los Angeles, shortly before leaving for Toronto.
A number of filmmakers, including Paul Greengrass and the Hughes Brothers, had hoped to capture Hendrix in a dramatic film since his death in 1970, at the age of 27. “Some very talented and accomplished individuals tried and, for one reason or another, were not able to seal the deal,” Mr. Ridley said.
“All Is by My Side” began roughly six years ago, when Mr. Ridley — a screenwriter whose historical “12 Years a Slave” is in Toronto with Fox Searchlight — became fascinated by an obscure Hendrix recording called “Sending My Love to Linda.” It was a tribute to Linda Keith (played here by Imogen Poots), who introduced the young guitarist to people in the music business who then brought him to London for a creative journey that becomes the subject of Mr. Ridley’s film.
Mr. Ridley sidestepped the thorny — and expensive — issue of music rights by focusing on an origins story that does not require using music written by Hendrix in his prime. “All Is by My Side” relies on songs written by others, and performed by André Benjamin, the rapper who plays the young guitarist. Mr. Benjamin spent six months learning not just how to play the guitar, but even how to do it left-handed, the way Hendrix did.
When the recorded music business was more robust, the promise of soundtrack sales from films like “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” about Loretta Lynn, or “La Bamba,” about Ritchie Valens, was a strong incentive to overcome deal-making differences.
As music sales decreased, however, the genre has come to rely on the raw passion of actors and filmmakers, who are often drawn to the innate drama of musical lives.
“You watched a man’s life change before your eyes, plus opera,” the director David Frankel said recently of his decision to make a film about Paul Potts, the unknown tenor who became an overnight sensation via YouTube and the reality television show “Britain’s Got Talent.”
Mr. Frankel’s film, titled “One Chance,” stars James Corden and has its world premiere here on Monday night, in advance of a planned January release by the Weinstein Company.
Speaking recently by telephone from his home in Miami, Mr. Frankel noted that musical biography had lost ground lately to a series of films based on stage musicals. “We’re not done with that,” he said of a movie musical cycle that, beyond “Les Misérables,” has included “Chicago,” “Rent,” “Nine,” “Dreamgirls” and “Rock of Ages.”
Apart from the films about Hendrix and Mr. Potts, the Toronto festival this year includes several pictures that are built around music, though in entirely different ways.
Those include “Metallica Through the Never,” a 3-D concert film and fantasy adventure; a drama about a fictional singer, played by Keira Knightley, “Can a Song Save Your Life?”(rights were acquired on Sunday by Weinstein); the portrait of a young girl, told through four songs, in François Ozon’s “Young & Beautiful”; and the back story of a backstage power, Shep Gordon, in Mike Myers’s documentary, “SuperMensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon.”
At its Saturday premiere, “SuperMensch” underscored Mr. Ridley’s point about the velocity of musical lives. Mr. Gordon, it pointed out, wound up living in the same Hollywood hotel as both Hendrix and Janis Joplin within one day of arriving in Los Angeles, in the late 1960s.
The biographies, for their part, belong to a new generation of music narratives that appear bent on telling their stories with narrower focus, and within shorter time frames, than classic biopics.
In the last decade, those more traditional music biographies have included “La Vie en Rose,” about Édith Piaf, and two films that erupted at past Toronto festivals: “Ray,” about Ray Charles, which screened here in 2004, and “Walk the Line,” about June Carter and Johnny Cash, from 2005. All three went on to make a splash at the Oscars, with 5 wins and 14 nominations among them.
But “the genre as we have known it is kind of over,” said Cynthia Mort, a writer and director who is putting the final touches on “Nina,” her independently financed film about the singer and songwriter Nina Simone.
In a recent telephone interview, Ms. Mort said the proliferation of digital music and online biographical information has put new pressure on filmmakers to tell more compressed and sharply angled stories. Her own, for instance, will focus very tightly on a love story, with Zoe Saldana and David Oyelowo in leading roles.
Lee Daniels recently said in a published interview that a drama about Joplin, with Amy Adams in the lead, will be his next film. Like Hendrix, Joplin died, at 27, in 1970.
It was a short life, but perhaps too long for the limits of musical biography in the digital era.
“I think they demand more focus,” Mr. Ridley said of contemporary viewers, who have little patience for the ups and downs of an entire life story.
“As a storyteller, you’ve got to dig more deeply now.”
Source: Ny times
