[Archive] Making a Jimi Hendrix Movie: If You’re Going to Shoot – Shoot! Don’t Talk

UPDATE DECEMBER 22, 2010 The proposed film is dead. A planned Jimi Hendrix biopic has been respectfully dropped at the request of Experience Hendrix, overseers of the Hendrix estate.

* UPDATE AUGUST 8, 2010 This is an archive post from almost a year ago. This post still pulls in a lot a traffic on a daily basis, so I thought I would update it so folks know what’s going on. There has been no additional news on this project, however a parallel project from Andre 3000 (The Outkast) has officially fallen through. /obvious

According to Variety, Legendary is going to take a crack at making a Jimi Hendrix bio-pic. This news broke mid last week but was quickly dismissed because it was discovered that Experience Hendrix – the keeper of the copyright for the Hendrix estate – had not granted approval.

Now it seems that Thomas Tull and Bill Gerber are going to develop the film and invest some time and cash in hopes of securing the rights after the fact. Thomas Tull is a producer heavyweight in Hollywood with credits including The Dark Knight, Inception, and The Hangover. Tull came up with It Might Get Loud in 2008, the guitar love-fest documentary with Jack White, Jimmy Page, and The Edge. It appears that Tull has a developing obsession with iconic guitarists which can only be a good thing for this project. It is going to take someone with love-born patience to shepherd a project of this ambition to the end.

Experience Hendrix, though lax in its oversight of the approximately 9,412 posthumous Hendrix releases (legit good ones being First Rays of the New Rising Sun and this year’s Valleys of Neptune), is notoriously fickle when it comes granting rights to movies retelling the artists life. VH1 must have held loved ones ransom to get the rights to make Hendrix - the made for VH1 biopic from 2000 that failed on every conceivable level to make one of rock’s most interesting pioneers interesting. Perhaps Experience Hendrix believed in Y2K or that no one would see it on VH1 anyway.

I wish Tull and Legendary luck. If Nowhere Boy, The Weinstein Company release coming up October 8 about John Lennon’s childhood and teenage life,  works out and a good Jimi pic can get off the ground, then two of my greatest musician to film dreams will be granted.

Tull’s untitled Hendrix project is still listed on IMDb as being in pre-production, so we can assume he still has the intention of going forward, but will Experience Hendrix ever get off the egg? This is one biopic, with the right performer attached, that I would love to see.

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