Left out of Compton

There's showbiz for you. One moment, you're a threat to the status quo, with the President worrying over your lyrics. The next, you've been assimilated into a Hollywood biopic.

So it is that NWA, who once threatened revolution in the streets find themselves atop the multiplexes. It shouldn't be much of a surprise - after all, we're several years past the time Eazy-E took lunch with President Bush at a Republican fundraiser:

The good people of Compton, though, won't be able to see their neighbourhood's moment in the sun - Compton doesn't have a cinema.

Although that's not quite as isolating as Digital Spy tries to make it sound. Because...

Dr Dre and Ice Cube fans will have to journey 4 miles east to Paramount's Bianchi Stadium theatre to witness their city depicted on-screen.

A four mile trip to the cinema isn't exactly onerous, is it? People in the suburbs of Brighton have to travel further than that to get to the pictures, and nobody's suggesting Straight Outta Withdean is going to get green lit soon.

More worryingly is the excising of Dre's treatment of women. Dre beat Dee Barnes, and she wonders why this isn't mentioned in the biopic:

That event isn’t depicted in Straight Outta Compton, but I don’t think it should have been, either. The truth is too ugly for a general audience. I didn’t want to see a depiction of me getting beat up, just like I didn’t want to see a depiction of Dre beating up Michel’le, his one-time girlfriend who recently summed up their relationship this way: “I was just a quiet girlfriend who got beat on and told to sit down and shut up.”

But what should have been addressed is that it occurred. When I was sitting there in the theater, and the movie’s timeline skipped by my attack without a glance, I was like, “Uhhh, what happened?” Like many of the women that knew and worked with N.W.A., I found myself a casualty of Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history.

Hollywood likes its gritty stories. But just not with too much reality. After all, you don't want your heroes to be unrelatable, right?

Whitney Houston's family help promote biopic

Lifetime, the US channel whose full name is 'We wouldn't be able to make these shitty biopics during the subject's Lifetime', has made a Whitney Houston movie.

Houston's family are outraged, but don't seem to have realised something:

Whitney Houston's family says the singer's fans should "brace themselves for the worst" if they watch Lifetime's television movie about the late singer that premieres Saturday.

Pat Houston, president of the singer's estate and her sister-in-law, issued a critical statement about the movie on Houston's website on the eve of the movie's airing. She said the movie was done without the family's blessing and against the wishes of her mother.

"If you watch this movie, watch it knowing that Lifetime is notorious for making bad biopics of deceased celebrities and brace yourself for the worst," Pat Houston wrote.

She said she didn't think it entered the minds of anyone involved with the project that "what lifts up one person in the headlines may in fact destroy another."

They think this is the sort of statement which will stop people watching; in fact, they couldn't be helping bark up an audience more if they were stood in the street with a placard, wearing a top hat, bellowing 'roll up! roll up!'.

No longer en vogue

Lifetime, the US network which makes the Hallmark Channel look like a Cage Fighting marathon, is airing a Christmas special:

Lifetime has "En Vogue Christmas" on its schedule this weekend ... it's a fictional movie about a family that convinces the group to reunite to save a local concert house.

I'm not sure that getting En Vogue back together is the strategy I'd have gone with - I can see that a Destiny's Child reunion might do the trick, but what cold-hearted developer is going to be impressed with En Vogue?

In real life, the builder would be going "ooh, En Vogue? Tell you what, if you can get the Honeyz back together I might leave car park untouched."

I could just be being cynical, of course. Maybe right now, getting a couple of tunes out of Sisters With Voices can be more effective in protecting an old building than a Grade II listing.

But the plot isn't what's interesting about the story. It turns out, Dawn Robinson - who quit En Vogue in 1997 - is upset that she's not been invited back to the fictional reunion, and is demanding payment. TMZ reports:

Former En Vogue singer Dawn Robinson will sue Lifetime if it dares to air a movie about the group that doesn't include her character.

"Her character" is, of course, not a character at all. It's her.

What makes it even more odd is that the film that Robinson is angry at being left out of is, in her opinion, likely to be shit:

Robinson says, at the very least, she will boycott Lifetime, telling us ... "I have no interest in watching it. It looks horrible. I'm sad for them. ... After seeing the Aaliyah biopic, I'm extremely worried that this is going to be a trainwreck."

So, yes, by her own analogy Dawn is like someone trying to sue a rail operator for not letting her board a train that subsequently crashed, killing everyone on board.

I really hope Lifetime counter-sue, demanding payment for having kept her out of it.

I really, really hope Lifetime have added in the following dialogue:

- Have all the band agreed to take part
- Well, Mommy, I still gotta call Dawn Robinson
- Oh, don't call her, poppet; she's so awful there's every chance they'd raze the whole neighbourhood, never mind the concert hall, if she was involved

Mercury falling

That Freddie Mercury film? The one with Sacha Baron Cohen/hold on no it's Ben Whishaw as Fred?
Starting to look increasingly like it's never going to happen. The Telegraph's Mandrake column brings the news:

So when will Whishaw actually set about the business of rocking us? “Actually, I don’t know what’s happening, it seems to be on the back-burner,” the Paddington star now admits in an interview with Time Out London. “It was going, then there were problems getting the script working.”

I'm taking this to mean the studio are going "he's being gay on too many pages", but it could simply be they're asking if Brian May wouldn't mind if his character became a wisecracking CGI badger. (I suspect Brian May wouldn't mind.)

Hanna movie gets UK distribution

The Punk Singer, the movie about Kathleen Hanna, is getting a proper UK distribution.

Dogwoof have picked up UK rights:

"We’re very much looking forward to releasing The Punk Singer alongside Kathleen Hanna’s return to the U.K. with the Julie Ruin tour in late May – the film’s documenting of this remarkable woman and the Riot Grrrl scene will no doubt go on to inspire a whole new audience in addition to the existing fanbase,” said [head of distribution Oli] Harbottle.

I suspect that unless there's also a 3D version you might still have to travel a little further than the nearest multiplex to see it, but good news for people who have the sort of cinemas which would show this sort of film.

Firm denial

The ghost of Jimi Hendrix makes it clear to the NME: No plans to work on a film about Andre 3000; currently spending all its efforts on developing a musical about the rise of Gnarls Barkley.

Gordon in the morning: A morning outing

The Sun has been dribbling out extracts from the Simon Cowell book all week - the suspicion that Sun staff might struggle with the reading borne out by the fact that it appears to take two people to copy chunks out and pretend it is interesting. They've bought a second book, too, a muck-rakey story about Jessie J. As a result, today's front page is especially unedifying:

Jessie gay
Simon NOT gay
Voice star 'is a secret lesbian'
Cowell: I'm totally straight

POP beauty Jessie J is 100 per cent lesbian, an explosive book claims.

Yes, the front page of a national newspaper is given over to a claim about a young woman's sexuality based on a book that isn't even about her.

The Voice judge, 24, was ordered to hide the truth from fans by claiming to be merely bisexual, the unauthorised biography says.

What? "Merely bisexual"? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Besides "demeaning to bisexuals". Does the paper believe that bisexuality is somehow the easy option? That isn't true.

Oh, but it's trendy, isn't it?

The Voice judge, 24, was ordered to hide the truth by record bosses to avoid turning off male fans, the unauthorised biography says.

They advised the star to say she was a bisexual who liked boys AND girls, because that was trendy.

That'd be right, as no man has ever had a sexual fantasy featuring a lesbian, ever. That's a fact.

Does The Sun really think that outing people - or, rather, choosing to disparage their own choice of self-sexual identification - is what a newspaper should be doing in 2012?

The author of the book, Chloe Gavin, claims:

“Being gay would alienate people. They knew how important image was and asked her to tone it down a bit.

“There are so many homophobes out and there were fears of a career-damaging backlash.”

It's true - being bisexual really takes the huff out of the homophobes. Who can forget Westboro Baptist Chruch, picketing funerals with signs saying 'God hates fags - if only you'd had sex with a woman from time to time, that would have been alright'.

There's a stern warning at the foot of the page:

© The Sun. Our lawyers are watching.

Presumably not lawyers who understand the bit about the right to a private life. Although, given how their company hacked and trailed solicitors, that's a typo and should read 'we're watching your lawyers'.

Gordon in the morning: Close Boyle

I suppose, since Streep is doing Thatcher, it left the casting for the pointless Susan Boyle biopic (plot: an hour and a half of pottering round the shops buying cat food, followed by two minutes of Americans watching YouTube and going 'wow', and ten minutes of declining interest) wide open.

Glenn Close.

It's such a pointless idea and such a rotten piece of casting even Gordon scratches his head to try and come up with an explanation:

SuBo and Glenn have got something in common too, they are huge animal lovers.

That's practically method acting right there.

It turns out Cowell had started to work on a film about Paul Potts but dropped the idea when... yes, when he saw that look on your face, going "Paul Potts? Paul Potts? What's that?"

Gordon in the morning: Making movies

In a wonderful piece of misguided stunt casting, Robert Pattinson has been lined up (apparently) to be Kurt Cobain in the biopic of his life. What an insane suggestion. Who would be so bats as to think that works?

R-Patz has been in regular contact with Kurt's widow COURTNEY LOVE, who has been handed a key role in the production by bosses at Universal Pictures.

The HOLE singer wanted R-Patz as Kurt and SCARLETT JOHANSSON to portray her. My graphics team have mocked up Rob and Scarlett as the hellraising pair.

Maybe there is more to Pattinson than mumbling and taking his shirt off, but it seems hard to believe it. Perhaps Love has added the direction 'Kurt squints a little'.

For once, I think Gordon's analysis might be spot-on:

I have to say, the 14-year-old in me was a little bit sick when I found out a Twilight vampire was playing a rock idol.

But at least it's an improvement on the man lined up to play Kurt in the West End - Footballers' Wives star GARY LUCY.

It's a bit like the Comic Strip's Strike, only with Alexei Sayle's miner encouraging the drafting in of the likes of Meryl Streep.

[UPDATE: Thank you to the young person who pointed out that I'd mistakenly called Robert Pattinson Robin. I'm afraid the other error contained in this article - the suggestion that Pattinson is an actor capable of portraying Kurt Cobain is beyond my powers to update.]

Michael Jackson: The Daily Telegraph doesn't get out much

The once mighty Daily Telegraph is over-excited by the news it has to share this morning:

A rare new biography of Michael Jackson by publishers Opus that the star hoped would be the "definitive book about his life" is to go ahead following a legal battle.

Rare? A rare biography?

I suppose it is going to be taking a place on a nearly empty shelf - after all, there's only Michael Jackson - Legend, Hero, Icon: A Tribute to the King of Pop by James Aldis. And Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness by J.Randy Taraborrelli. Oh, and Michael Jackson: Life of a Legend by Michael Heatley. Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson by Ian Halperin, Michael Jackson Conspiracy by Aphrodite Jones, Michael Jackson: Legend 1958-2009 by Chas Newkey-Burden and Michael Jackson: The Unauthorised Biography by Michael Heatley, too, of course. And, perhaps, The Michael Jackson Treasures: Celebrating the King of Pop in Photos and Memorabilia by Jason King, Michael Jackson - King of Pop: 1958 - 2009 by Emily Herbert, In the Studio with Michael Jackson by Bruce Swedien, Michael Jackson: The Visual Documentary by Adrian Grant, Michael Jackson, King of Pop by Wey-Yuih Loh, Michael Jackson: Before He Was King by Todd Gray, The Trials of Michael Jackson by Lynton Guest, Michael Jackson: For The Record by Chris Cadman and Craig Halstead and Michael Jackson: The Man Behind the Mask: An Insider's Story of the King of Pop by Bob Jones and Stacey Brown aside, there's hardly even been a work considering the man's life. I wonder why it's taken so long.

The Kurtis Blow story can only be months away

As the cinema demonstrates its usual "if people liked that, let's make a thousand versions of that sort of thing" mentality, the NWA story moves into preproduction.

They're calling it Straight Outta Compton, which gives you the idea of how much thought is going into this. No time to think; let's try and catch the BIG coat-tails...

Madonna wants to be a Simpson

The Sun reckons that Madonna is keen to play Wallis Simpson in a movie. Wallis Simpson.

Grandpa Simpson, perhaps, but not Wallis, surely?

"Madonna said she is fascinated about this American commoner who refused to conform or offer explanations for her tangled love life," the source added. "It was all systems go until the divorce [from Ritchie], when everything was put on the back-burner. When things in her life settle down this year, she's keen to get things going again."

It's not clear if this is to be a rubbish musical or a straight, unwatchable biopic. Hopefully it'd be a musical, because we'd love to see a bunch of musicians having a go at the song my Dad used to sing when he was a king - to the tune of a Christmas carol:
Hark, the herald angels sing
Wallis Simpson stole our king
There is, of course, a parallel between Madonna and Simpson's life. Both were divorced Americans whose romance with posh Brits distracted the men from doing jobs they were a bit rubbish at.

The Swan of Brooklyn

Given that the lazy formulation is that if Shakespeare was alive today he'd be writing for EastEnders, and that Jamal Woolard reckons that Biggie Smalls was this generation's Shakespeare, does that mean the Notorious BIG should have been putting words into Peggy Mitchell's mouth?

It's fair enough that Woolard wants to aggrandise Smalls - after all, he's playing him in a hagiographical movie so it's his job. But couldn't someone at least have asked him to show his working when he makes such a claim:

"Biggie was an influence in every aspect of my music – from the lifestyle to our values to what we believed in. We all had big dreams, we wanted to be musicians, or doctors or lawyers. We all looked up to him. Biggie to us was like our Shakespeare."

Come on, Woolard: A comparison with The Beatles, perhaps. Maybe even Larkin. But Shakespeare? Really? There might even have been some poetic resonance in comparing him to Marlowe.

Michael Jackson is healthy

Despite what the Sunday Express might have told you, Michael Jackson isn't looking to have his lungs replaced:

Dr Tohme Tohme said in a statement issued to Reuters that stories claiming the singer was unwell were not true.

He added that author Ian Halperin made the claims to promote his unauthorised biography of the 50-year-old singer.

"The writer's wild allegations concerning Mr Jackson's health are a total fabrication," he said.

Although, of course, last month when Jackson's people told the High Court that he was too unwell to travel to give evidence, back then he was seriously unwell. Since then he's got so much better, though. Fighting fit.

Meat Puppet manifesto

It's going to arrive too late for the Christmas books market - perhaps, though, they're not aiming for that with a definitive history of the Meat Puppets. It's going to be arriving early in the new year:

authored by Jake Brown and featuring exclusive, first-hand interviews with brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood, as well as the band's other band members- including ex-drummer Derrick Bostrom, producers- including an exclusive interview with Butthole Surfers' guitarist/MP producer Paul Leary, and related eye-witnesses, this book marks the first authorized study of the writing and recording process behind the band's catalog of 12 studio LPS- including a real-time chronicle of the Pup's recording of their 13th album- this book is a must-have for any MP fan!

Let's hope the book isn't quite as overwritten as the blurb.

The Clash want your cash

After having spent the summer watching John 'I never did' Lydon trying to flog Sex Pistols DVDs, it's almost something of a relief to know that the focus of the not-punk-anymore market is shifting to The Clash this autumn: the 1982 Shea Stadium gig - where they supported The Who - is out on CD in October; accompanied by a DVD which we're apparently forced to describe as a career-spanning retrospective and - leading it all off - an official biography.

No Marty, no cry

Martin Scorsese has decided he doesn't want to be involved any longer with the Bob Marley biopic - down to "scheduling conflicts", apparently.

Not to worry, though: Jonathan Demme has got some spare time and is stepping in to the project instead. There are now a slew of producers who seem to move from one music biopic to the next. Doubtless if Demme had also been busy, Pennebaker would have been next on the speed-dial.

Hewitt comes to bury Weller, not to praise him

Paolo Hewitt has carved out quite a niche for himself over the years, writing official Jam biographies and collaborating with Paul Weller, but it appears that the Mod Boswell has fallen out with his Johnson. The Mail gleefully previews the latest Weller book from Hewitt - The Changing Man - which shows signs of having been written after the pair fell out at the start of 2006:

"After lunch one day, Simon Halfon (his designer) gave Paul and me a lift in his 1967 Mustang," Hewitt remembers.

"I was sitting in the back, Paul and Simon up front. Simon, who was driving, turned on the car radio. 'Turn that shit off,' Paul snapped.

"'For God's sake,' Simon shouted back, "it's you, you idiot."

"And it was. It was his song The Changing Man."

To be fair, the stripped down demos that finally got a release a couple of years ago showed that the official releases at that time had been totally overproduced - maybe it's fair that Weller didn't recognise his own works.

Hewitt appears to suggest that many of Weller's problems might be down to the drugs:

After his marriage broke up, Weller began dabbling in drugs.

"It was the beginning of a period in his life characterised by a regular ingestion of chemicals," says Hewitt.

"Until then he had steered clear of them.

"He had tried Ecstasy once - he took a quarter of a pill on New Year's Eve 1990 at a club in Paddington and nibbled on my ear for five minutes. But it was only in the mid-Nineties when, as the Blur musician Damon Albarn so succinctly put it, 'a blizzard of cocaine descended on London' that Paul really turned his attention to chemicals.

"Cocaine was his thing, as it was for many others."

... and also, erm, Malcolm McDowell:

Weller usually abhorred violence, according to Hewitt, but he was also fascinated by it.

"I remember one day asking him what he'd got up to the night before and him replying that he had watched A Clockwork Orange 'for the millionth time'. Then he added, 'I got to stop watching it,' as if he was deriving some kind of unhealthy pleasure from it.

"There is a mean streak in Paul that in part mirrors the film's main character, Alex, and his violent tendencies."

Hewitt's reluctant to reveal what the falling-out was about, but it was bad enough to turn hagiographer into character hitman.