Dudes like……wait a minute…..dude……”Dark Star,” a biopic on Jerry Garcia is on the way (announced in 2008 for the stoners that can’t remember).
Based on Robert Greenfield’s book “Dark Star: An Oral Biography on Jerry Garcia,” the film will take a unique approach to the jam band legend’s life as it will “focus on Garcia’s early life before he became the figurehead of the legendary jam band.” But fans will at least get a tease of the iconic group as “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.”
As author Greenfield explains, ” “I don’t think Jerry is easily understood. I think he’s a complex human being. 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 goes on to explain that the film will try to sell the idea that drugs and psychedelics were only a small part of Garcia’s songwriting and guitar playing style, but c’mon: “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. 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.”
The talent behind the screen stars pretty low on the ladder with Topper Lilien (“Dungeons & Dragons,” “Where The Money Is”) being tapped to pen the screenplay. More promisingly however, Amir Bar-Lev, the director behind the acclaimed Sundance sensation “The Tillman Story” and the New Orleans doc “Trouble The Water” will helm the picture, and certainly his background will be a great asset here.
No firm date on when this will go in front of cameras, but production is being eyed for early next year. [Rolling Stone]