"We will never get an honest biopic of ____ as long as ____ is still alive"

John Lennon/Yoko Ono

Badfinger/Joey Molland

 

Jimi Hendrix/Janie Hendrix

 

Led Zeppelin/Jimmy Page.

 

Jerry Lee Lewis / Jerry Lee Lewis and his lawyers

 

Clara Bow/ Hollywood, USA

 

Does it really get worse than the public knowledge (and in "Great Balls of Fire") marrying his 13 year old cousin?

 

Ozzy Osbourne or Black Sabbath / Sharon Osbourne

 

One shudders to think.

 

Oh yes. Yes it does. I'm not an expert on the man but anything I have read over the last 40 years indicates he is a real piece of work. And don't cross him - or marry him.

 

Bingo.

 

I thought that she was eleven or twelve! What was the age of consent in Louisiana back then?
In Florida it was fourteen when I lived there (way back in the early days of Beatlemania).

 

"We will never get an honest biopic of The Beatles as long as Paul McCartney is still alive".

 

Gene Clark as long as David Crosby is still alive

 

Steve Hoffman / this forum

 

Slash (Saul Hudson)/ Perla
Neil Peart/ Geddy Lee
Geddy Lee/ Neil Peart

 

Van Halen / Eddie & Alex

Journey / Steve Perry - I only mention this one thinking back to Herbie Herbert’s charge that Perry had some sort of say in certain aspects of content in the Behind the Music episode with the band. Details escape me but that whole, long interview years ago with Herbert was a fascinating read.

Someone beat me to Ozzy / Sharon. If it were done today, no doubt the script would write Daisley and Kerslake completely out of the story.

 

Pretty sure Ringo wouldn't slag George too badly...

 

Robert Palmer and lawyers

 

There was the wife who wanted to divorce him and wound up on the bottom of a pool:
The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis

 

DJT / DJT

Powerful people / Jeffrey Epstein ...............Oh, wait....

Jeffrey Epstein / Powerful people

 

BIG TIME. Not even pleasant to contemplate.

 

Ain't that the truth.

 

I worked on the Motown 40 special for 6 months back in 1998, which had lots of cooperation from Berry Gordy and was produced by his longtime associate, Suzanne DePasse. At one point, I asked the supervising producer that I worked with every day, "gee, do you think we'll ever get the complete story on Berry Gordy and Motown," and she shook her head and said, "honey, that isn't going to happen as long as Berry Gordy and Diana Ross are still alive." And she acknowledged that there were some terrible, dark secrets that were not widely known, plus facts that they weren't going to go into in the 4-hour show we did.

We had enough material to do a 10-hour "Anthology"-type documentary on the label, but because the ratings were so poor, they opted not to rerun the show nor expand it. I don't think it ever got reissued on home video, either. And it's a shame, because I think we did over 100 hours of new interviews with Motown artists, producers, and songwriters who had quite a bit to say. (Michael Jackson agreed to being interviewed for the show, then cancelled six times in a row, so they wound up just using archival footage instead.)

As to the Beatles, it's fair to say that McCartney is more concerned about his legacy at this point than the money or the fame, so I tend to doubt he's going to want certain negative facts or stories being mentioned. The original "director's cut" of the Beatles Anthology documentary is out there on the net, and it's clear that the negative portrayal of Yoko Ono plus some of the more sordid facts about Brian Epstein wound up on the cutting room floor. To me, I think there's a way to deal with that stuff in an honest way without wallowing in it. But to ignore it completely is an unfair bias that doesn't present the whole story, and it ignores the objective truth of what actually happened. And that's at the heart of what a documentary is supposed to be.