Biopics currently rule the roost in Hollywood, but is the world ready for big-screen lives of everyone from the president-elect to Madonna?
There are 73 films on this years Black List, the annual compendium of popular unproduced screenplays. The most popular film-in-waiting there is a biopic of Madonnas early career. There is also a Monica Lewinsky biopic, one about Donald Trump and two on Stephen Kings life. Carl Sagan turns up in one. Tonya Harding turns up in another. Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin and Boudicca all turn up. George Harrison turns up twice. Given that four former Black List entries have won the best picture Oscar over the past six years, this means we will be drowning in biopics very soon.
In fact, we already are. We always are. Even though the only biopic to meaningfully cut through to this awards season is Natalie Portmans Jackie, we also haveBarry (Barack Obama), The Founder (McDonalds founder Ray Kroc), Sully (Chesley Sullenberger), The Birth of a Nation (Nat Turner), A United Kingdom (Prince Seretse Khama of Botswana) and Florence Foster Jenkins (Florence Foster Jenkins), among many others.
By rights, we should be sick of biopics by now. They come so thick and fast, and tend to be so formulaic and middlebrow that they have ossified into a kind of Oscar-bait genre of their own. The nadir undoubtedly came a couple of years ago, when two identical biopics about brilliant posh British people facing adversity The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game duked it out so interminably that stars Eddie Redmayne and Benedict Cumberbatch ended up melding into a horrific, deferential, two-headed, plummy hydra for the duration of awards season. Worse yet, nobody outside of the professional awards industry actually seemed to care about either film.
Thats a bad sign. A better sign, though, is the fact that many staid biopics appear to have been cut out of this awards season race. Sully which looks like it was written and directed by an algorithm set up to mimic all the worst biopics is vanishing without trace. And, although Jackie is there, it is as nervy and unconventional as any bopic you have ever seen.
Biopics are not going away, of course, but it looks like they might be getting weirder, and not a minute too soon. So, while the Madonna script might not inspire much in the way of hope, at least the Black List also contains a surreal script about Stephen King going berserk and making a film about murderous vending machines. Thats got Oscar-winner written all over it.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/shortcuts/2016/dec/13/hollywood-obsession-biopics-must-be-stopped-madonna-the-movie-trump
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