Born to Fun

Musical biopics as the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.

It’s past time to reactivate an old idea I’ve been coveting for too long: a hypothetical/reimagined and extra-super-unauthorized biopic about the great rock and television drummer Max Weinberg that I call Born to Fun.

I conceived of this project years ago but like Clint Eastwood after he acquired the script for Unforgiven I have been sitting on it until I was old enough to play the lead role myself. I will also write, direct, produce and design the costumes for this picture. I’ll take my points out of the back end, so I think conservatively I can make this movie happen for under a hundred million mazoolians (£82,455,000). Please let me know if you want to invest (serious inquiries only).

A disquieting percentage of music biopics fall down on simple foundational flaws inherent in the genre. The legacy of the famous musician whose story is being told often threatens to outshine the actor who has been cast to play him — I have to squint pretty hard to pretend that Joaquin Phoenix is Johnny Cash when I know quite well what Johnny Cash looked and sounded like. Additionally it just rings painfully false when they have to cram the messy life story and great music and unique stage presence and fashion iconoclasm etc. into something with a structure conventional enough to have the broadest possible appeal. You can scarcely enjoy a masterpiece like Coal Miner’s Daughter without a Get on Up or a Bohemian Rhapsody making you feel like an embarrassing disservice has been done to one of the greatest musical acts to ever take the stage.

Todd Haynes found a clarifying workaround with his 2007 film I’m Not There, a Bob Dylan biopic that explores the essence of its subject by almost never naming him directly on film and fracturing its Dylanalysis into multiple reimagined conceptualizations of contrasting aspects of Dylan’s various personae. Haynes shrewdly understood that attempting to “tell” the “story” of the “real” Dylan would be like staring into the center of the sun for a few hours and then trying to explain what you saw through a planetarium light show. His clever approach became a tacit critique of the musical biopic subgenre itself: better to get a vague impression and then approach the burning star from oblique angles. Paradoxically in this way one gets much closer to some kind of truth about a cultural Hydra like a Dylan (or a James Brown or a Freddie Mercury, if good movies had been made about those deserving revolutionaries instead of bad ones).

This is someting of the approach we will borrow for Born to Fun. For this reason and possibly to cover my ass for legal purposes we might call our character Maxx Wine Bar. This depends in part on what level of cooperation I can get from Weinberg and his people.

So our Maxx is a nice Jewish boy growing up in New Jersey, busts out of class, had to get away from those fools. He’s on his way to study law and become a square john suburbanite but the highway is jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive, so he goes down the shore and finds drumming work with a ruggedly handsome, impossibly charismatic rock singer/songwriter with the stage energy of a hydrogen bomb. Pending legal inquiries we’ll call this character Trace Sprungsteam, a part for which I’m envisioning John David Washington. This is partly because I think Washington is a good actor with the look and energy I want for Trace and is also a nod to an offhanded comment Dylan makes in his memoir Chronicles Volume One remarking that J.D. Wash’s father Denzel should have played Woody Guthrie in a film.

Maxx becomes the stalwart rhythm rook of Trace’s “G Lane Band” and together they roll across the foreboding heights of rock stardom. Trace becomes well-respected as a songwriter, workingman’s rock star and a performer who as a rule holds nothing back, giving his fans everything he has to give and getting the best out of his band — cultivating Maxx’s natural good nature, positivity and enthusiasm into signature traits in his already technically refined drumming.

But across the state line in New York City the boys upstairs catch wind of Maxx’s abilities and ask him if he’d want to work on television for a new late night interview/comedy program they are developing. Trace decides to send Maxx across the river and into the television business as his mole and so constructs an elaboate ruse whereby he (Trace) begins exploring a more stripped-down and reflective solo recording style with a record he calls Alaska. This gives him an excuse to fire the G Lane Band, prompting the television network to make Maxx an offer as the bandleader for their new late night host Cameron O’Brennan. Trace wants a man on the inside of the New York late night television world as an information conduit.

O’Brennan is a tall, red-headed, whip-smart, tightly-wound and hilariously quick-witted former writer for The Simpsons with an obsession with history and old-timey Americana who stumbled into an opportunity to reinvent the concept of late night talk show comedy. For this role I’d ideally prefer Cate Blanchett, both because I think she’s one of the best actors working and as a nod to her ingenious turn as one of the Dylanesque characters in I’m Not There. We need someone of her charisma and versatility as a counterweight to Washington’s character because that is the essence of Born to Fun: the story of a talented, humble and good-humored drummer from Jersey who can lay down a beat so killer that it brings the warring poles of late night television and arena rock into harmony.

In order to work for Late at Night with Cameron O’Brennan Maxx has to embark on a trawling-the-musical-underworld montage to piece together the six best neo-swing musicians in New York City, culminating in him traveling forward in time to the year 2000 to retrieve a LaBamba-like trombonist with a Cassandra-like complex that we shall call LaSsandra.

The Maxx Wine Bar Seven become the greatest house band in the history of late night television. But despite LaSsandra’s prognostications of trouble Maxx has so much fun working for O’Brennan that he loses sight of his espionage objectives on behalf of Trace and, by symbolic proxy, all of Jersey. LaSsandra lets slip to O’Brennan that Trace sent Maxx in to spy on him and so O’Brennan flips Maxx as a double agent. When Trace reforms the G Lane Band for a reunion tour O’Brennan hires a fill-in drummer and sends Maxx back out on the road as his man on the inside of Trace’s organization.

As usually happens to spies in these situations, all of this causes a fracturing of Maxx’s identity and he breaks under the pressure. To resolve his inner conflict he takes his drumset out to the middle of the George Washington Bridge where he embarks upon a furious drum solo that becomes an all-consuming spiritual/rhythmic wormhole into which his consciousness beats an ascending path. There he finds himself enjoined in a drum battle with the greatest swing drummer ever Buddy Rich and is granted an audience with the spirit of O’Brennan’s regular Christmastime guest performer Tony Bennett.

Bennett redeploys Maxx to the mortal plane just as O’Brennan from the NYC side and Trace from the Jersey side come rushing to the center of the George Washington both thinking that Maxx is in danger of harming himself. Instead he exits the wormhole and drum solo armed with a knowledge of what must be done: peace must be cultivated between Late at Night and G Lane with a special Christmas show where the G Lane Band will join the Maxx Wine Bar Seven for a rollicking round of rock/swing takes on some of your better Christmas classics. (We’ll definitely never clear this but if we could get All I Want for Christmas Is You in there I’d be pleased. That’s a non sequitur; I want it just because I think it’s a great song.)

The Christmas show is a smashing success and all seems well but the story ends on a foreboding note and it seems possible that the unity Maxx has brokered may now be tested against a much greater threat. Storm clouds gather from out west as the trite, hacky, cynical and non-funny host of O’Brennan’s lead-in program The On Tonight Show, a character we’ll call Ray Minnow, is fomenting lies and back-room machinations to entrap O’Brennan and the Maxx Wine Bar Seven into quitting the network. This is because Minnow, who is incomparably and offensively terrible at his job of hosting a late night television comedy program, is threatened by what is possible now that the raw charisma of Trace and O’Brennan have been brought into harmonic alignment by Maxx’s transcendently good drumming and bandleading.

Now I know you’re thinking we’re going to get Max Weinberg on the music for this picture, and that’s fine for the rock and swing performing sequences. But I want to go in a different direction for the non-diegetic music. To score the desolate boredom of growing up in New Jersey, a pain I know all too well, I want Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, doing an industrial/boardwalk take on their musical work on The Proposition. To differentiate the vibe for the New York/television parts of the story I want the manic film-scoring aggression of Mike Patton. And finally for a sense of resolution with that dollop of foreboding at the end I need to borrow Johnny Greenwood.

That’s my treatment and I’m sticking to it. I do hope you’ll consider investing. If I run into the real Maxxxxxxx Weinberg at the sauna I will watch for an opportune moment to ask him about getting the rights to his life and music. While I try to get this and the financing together I will also take bids from skilled cartoonists of all styles who want to realize this project visually as a proof of concept. I’ve been reading a lot of old Popeye comics lately so I could see an old-timey newspaper strip style being an interesting approach for Born to Fun but ultimately we need to get this thing into the multiplexes to unlock the full potential of the energy for this project.