Bio-Mania

One of the key characters in “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” the current film about 1950s teen idol Frankie Lymon, is Roulette Records founder Morris Levy, who released Lymon’s original hits and owned the lucrative music publishing rights to the songs. Levy, who was facing a 10-year prison term for extortion when he died in 1990, had a career marred by the murders of two close business associates, brawls with record bootleggers and links with convicted mobsters.

So when Warner Films president of music Gary LeMel worked with “Fools” screenwriter Tina Andrews on the script, he couldn’t help feeling nervous about the movie’s frank portrayal of Levy. “You don’t know how many times I said, ‘Shouldn’t we fictionalize the guy?’ ” LeMel recalls with a laugh. “I know he’s dead, but why take any chances?”

Filmmakers are taking lots of risks these days, because the new hot ticket in Hollywood is the real-life story, an age-old movie genre known in industry parlance as the biopic. Directed by Gregory Nava, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” is one of a new batch of upcoming biopics. Distributed by Warner Bros., the movie chronicles Lymon’s life story from the point of view of three women, all claiming to have been his wife. “Permanent Midnight,” a film starring Ben Stiller as drug-addled TV writer Jerry Stahl, is due later this month, as is “Without Limits,” the second film about fabled Oregon track star Steve Prefontaine. “Love Is the Devil,” based on the life of painter Francis Bacon, arrives in October. Two more films are currently in production: “Man on the Moon,” which stars Jim Carrey as comic Andy Kaufman, and “Abbie!,” which features Vincent D’Onofrio as radical-prankster Abbie Hoffman.

Studio development slates are chock-full of enticing projects, with scripts in hand, in progress or under consideration about such icons as Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Bob Marley, Phil Spector, Mickey Mantle, Evel Knievel, Halston, Miles Davis, Janis Joplin, Charles Lindbergh and, oh yes, the Village People.

By Hollywood standards, this revival is an especially curious phenomenon since there’s no discernible commercial model for biopic success. In Hollywood, most trends are inspired by box-office results. It took the surprise success of “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” to prompt a wave of teen horror films designed to cash in on the newly discovered youth market. When Quentin Tarantino hit pay dirt with “Pulp Fiction,” the stampede was on for scripts studded with darkly comic criminal high jinks and allusions to bad ‘70s TV shows.

But biopics have rarely been hits, the notable exceptions being “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” “Selena,” “Shine” and “Private Parts.” Over the last decade, the flops (“Hoffa,” “Nixon” and “Cobb”) have outweighed the hits. Even “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” despite a flood of media attention, was a money-loser.

Real People and Their Really Dramatic Lives

So why do filmmakers keep at it? One reason: Real life provides vivid characters who’ve lived dramatic lives. Biopics are also easier to sell because they offer studios a recognizable name to market. Best of all, biopics are magnets for talent; stars are attracted to the projects by their prestige and Oscar-statuette potential.

“There’s always a line of movie stars who want to play these guys,” says Rhino Films head Stephen Nemeth, one of the producers of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.” “Actors want to prove they can do everything, so it’s a vicarious thrill to play a musician or a sports star.”

For studios, biopics offer an opportunity to tell inspirational stories. “It’s a way to make movies about great characters,” says Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal, who has a host of biographies in development, including films about Ali, Lennon, Houdini, Davis and Joan of Arc. Pascal recently announced that Will Smith and director Barry Sonnenfeld will team again to make the Ali story, with filming beginning around November 1999. She also persuaded Yoko Ono to give Sony the rights to a film about Lennon, though no filmmakers are attached to the project yet.

“For me, Ali, Lennon and Houdini aren’t just great characters--they represent a special time in our world,” Pascal says. “Their stories are about our cultural history. That’s the great thing about real-life stories--it allows filmmakers to say something about our world.”

At Least the Execs Can’t Do Much Rewriting

For screenwriters, biopics present a welcome escape from studio meddling. “Movies have become incredibly formulaic, but real life allowed us to break the mold,” says Larry Karaszewski, who with writing partner Scott Alexander has written “Ed Wood,” “Larry Flynt” and “Man on the Moon,” with Marx Brothers and Village People projects on the horizon. “Reality protected us from the typical Hollywood blandness. The studio executives couldn’t say, ‘Larry Flynt has to learn a lesson or Ed Wood has to make a good movie in the third act.’ ”

Still, biopics are complicated undertakings, especially when it comes to obtaining the rights to a person’s life story, either from the character himself, from his estate or by acquiring a book about the character’s life. Writer-director Ron Shelton, who hopes to begin filming his Marley project early next year, says nothing is “more byzantine” than the rights to Marley’s life and music.

“When he died, he had signed publishing deals with different people on the same songs, and that’s not counting the songs he wrote that were in his wife, Rita’s, name,” Shelton says. “He also has 22 children, 12 acknowledged by the courts, at least nine of whom were not fathered with his wife. It took 17 years to sort everything out, and ‘sorting out’ is a polite term.”

Hollywood has been pursuing an Abbie Hoffman movie for decades. “Abbie!” has a 1970s scene in which Hoffman, then a fugitive, meets with two Universal Pictures executives who pitch his life as a movie idea. “We see this as a big, wild comedy, like ‘Animal House.’ ” one executive says. “It’s a way to reach lots of kids, to radicalize them.”

Universal did, in fact, commission a script on Hoffman in the late 1970s, but the project never got off the ground. “Abbie!” director-producer Robert Greenwald, who had lent Hoffman money when he was underground, commissioned a new script several years ago, buying two books, one by Hoffman’s wife, Anita, as source material. Anita also serves as a consultant on the film, while actor Troy Garity, Tom Hayden’s son, plays Hayden in the film.

“Fools,” which stars Larenz Tate as Lymon, hired two of the singer’s three ex-wives as consultants. “I’m still betting we’ll somehow get sued in the end,” LeMel says. “When you make a biography, lawsuits come with the territory. You always have some shady guys or ex-girlfriends coming out of the woodwork, thinking the movie is really about them.”

For some filmmakers, the best biographical premise is not a person but a piece of time. Jersey Films co-chairman Stacy Sher, one of the producers of the Andy Kaufman story, is also developing films about the ‘70s New York punk scene and the early-’60s world of the Peppermint Lounge, the latter with a script written by Richard La Gravenese.

“My favorite movies have always been films like ‘Nashville’ and ‘Boogie Nights,’ which are about America during a very specific period, usually when things turn dark and people lost their naivete,” Sher says. “It’s always important for a movie to have a sense of place. With the Peppermint Lounge, you get to see the youth culture going mainstream, with teenagers, socialites, musicians and mobsters all doing the Twist together.”

For many projects, a star presence is a marketing imperative. For the last two years, the Hollywood trades have reported on a pair of Janis Joplin projects. But neither project has commenced, in part because of casting problems. “Man on the Moon,” on the other hand, is being made largely because the Kaufman character was a magnet for A-list actors. Before Carrey won the role, such top names as Nicolas Cage, Edward Norton and John Cusack vied for the part.

Some Fiction Gets Mixed In With Facts

Biopics often liberally mix fact with fiction. In “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” for example, sharp-eyed rock fans will notice that while the real-life Lymon made a comeback on “Hollywood A-Go-Go” on a bill with the McCoys, the film shows him performing on “Hullabaloo” with the Kinks.

Nava, who also directed “Selena,” says he took far more liberties with the Lymon story. “With ‘Selena,’ we told it as it really happened,” he says. “With Frankie, there were so many different versions of the truth that it was like being a detective, reconstructing the story from the information you had available. It became the film’s dramatic point of view--instead of trying to clarify things, we accentuated how different his wives’ recollections were.”

The truth is that even the most scrupulously rendered biographies only capture a reflection of reality--the whole truth is buried too deep. Alexander and Karaszewski say there’s an essential mystery to people’s lives that appeals to movie audiences. But writing a biographical story remains a challenge. Working on “Man on the Moon,” the screenwriters were worried that Kaufman’s life was so screwy and formless that they’d never find a way to structure his story. Then, one day, when they were talking to an old girlfriend of Kaufman’s, she told them, “Guys, you don’t understand--there’s no real Andy.”

“That was when the script really crystallized,” Karaszewski says. “We realized that was the movie--it’s about a person who wasn’t happy unless he was putting on a mask. No matter how well you knew him, when you peeled away each layer, all you found was another mask.”