Something that has fallen off everybody’s radar is the fact that Don Cheadle has been developing a Miles Davis biopic to direct and star in for over a year. His company is producing too.
First reported in Variety in March of 2007, there’s been little movement on what definitely seems like a passion project for Cheadle. However in November, in a piece about the up-hill difficulties in making film biopics, Variety checked in on the project and they noted interestingly enough that the project was actually the “brainchild of Davis’ estate, which very deliberately decided to expand its brand with a biopic, on the heels of the success of ‘Ray.’ “
The Davis Estate wanted him from minute one even approached the actor with the idea.
“Basically there was Don, and there was Don,” Darryl Porter, who manages Miles Davis Properties LLC in Hollywood, told Variety about the discussions about who might play the jazz legend. Cheadle was actually a jazz saxophonist at one time and needed little convincing.
Recent headway is being made though. There’s a biopic about Aretha Franklin also in the works and the Queen of Soul told the AP in a December 17, 2008 interview that she had just finished meeting with the writers and, “they are just finishing a movie (about) Miles Davis, and I am waiting for a first draft.”
Cheadle also recently spoke to Essence magazine about the project insisting he doesn’t want to make the film a typical paint-by-numbers biography.
“The Miles movie I’m trying to do is not some traditional biopic. It’s an interpretation of himself, more than it is attempting to be some sort of cradle-to-grave, historically accurate depiction of who he was. The first line in our movie, with him in the dark, is of him saying ‘Some of this shit might have happened.’
Porter had already echoed that sentiment calling it a “deconstructed biopic,” that will appeal to more than just, “jazz heads… our goal is to have a very broad audience and bring in a whole new demographic of Miles fans.”
That’s all the info there is out there right now, but it sounds like a script is ready and the project is moving forward. A lot of biopics fumble hard when trying to cover the life of an icon, but so far, it sounds like these guys have their heads and ideas in the right direction. Maybe once “Iron Man 2” is done shooting, cameras can roll? That’s just hopeful speculation on our part. BTW, Milesdavis.wordpress.com has done a great job of covering all Miles news and developments on this project.