Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Keith Moon Was Here


About ten years ago, filmmaker Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Straight to Hell) was commissioned to write a screenplay based on the life of Keith Moon, the Who's legendary drummer and destroyer of hotel rooms.

From AlexCox.com: "Co-written by me and Tod [Davies] for American and London-based producers. The life of Keith Moon, whose antagonist we decided should be Peter Sellers. Sellers first appears as a giant spider, then as himself, then as Harry Nilsson, in whose London apartment rock stars invariably die. Supporting cast includes the other members of The Who, The Beatles, and Steve McQueen. Of all the scripts the two of us wrote together, this is the best."

In an interview with the Austin Decider, Cox describes why the film wasn't made:

"I think Roger Daltrey was the executive producer, and so maybe it didn’t fit his recollection of events or vision of the story [Daltrey is also portrayed as a bit of a wanker in the script] ...I think that the people who wanted to make the film were expecting more of a mainstream biopic — which is really hard, to make a guy like that sympathetic. I mean, the guy’s a serial wife beater, you know? It’s really hard to make a guy like that conventionally sympathetic."

Here's the screenplay for Keith Moon Was Here, which, despite a few anachronisms and other minor inaccuracies, would have made a great film, especially with someone like Colin Farrell in the part (and not Mike Myers, who was long rumored to be playing Moon):

http://www.alexcox.com/pdfs/MOON_1.pdf

1 comment:

Marc Solomon said...

How did you unearth this surface-to-air missive? A very different story, JM if the many Keith Moons from now are intercepted by pharma before the demons get there fist.