A Flood of Film Biography

The rush is on to resurrect practically everybody

It used to be that when thieves broke in to steal from a famous man's tomb, they made off with the gold and jewelry. Nowadays they skip all that and rifle the corpse's pockets for letters, laundry slips, and just about anything else that will help sell the poor man's story to the movies, TV and even Broadway. Biographies, long the mainstay of the reading public, have become the hottest items in show business. Hardly has a celebrity finished his life--and often only half his life--than some producer is looking for writers and actors to do an instant replay.

Recent weeks have seen television biographies of Judy Garland, Abbott and Costello, Television Reporter and Cancer Victim Betty Rollin, Baseball Player Ron LeFlore, and Sally Stanford, a California madam who was elected mayor of Sausalito. Early next year Elvis Presley, who died only 16 months ago, will re-emerge on ABC in the person of Kurt Russell. Elvis Redux will be followed by an ABC-TV movie with Robert Duvall playing Dwight D. Eisenhower. This month, an all-star acting team will impersonate every President from Taft to Eisenhower in NBC's eight-part mini-series called Backstairs at the White House. In a bizarre turnabout, Producer Larry Jacobson, of American International Television, has persuaded 16 stars and sports celebrities, including Rosemary Clooney and Neil Sedaka, to re-enact turning points in their lives --everything from nervous breakdowns to deepest career crises. "They actually rented out the apartment I had my breakdown in," marvels Comedian Marty Ingels, "and hired the girl that kept me alive for nine months by bringing me soup."

One of the top-grossing movies of the fall was Midnight Express, a true (well, partly true) story of American College Student Billy Hayes' 1975 escape from a Turkish prison. One of the surprise critical successes of 1978 was the movie life of Rock Singer Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash in 1959. The next couple of years will loose a flood of screen biographies. Filming is completed on Heart Beat, the story of the three-way romance of Beat Generation Heroes Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac and Cassady's wife Carolyn. Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek play the Cassadys, and John Heard is the author of that hipster bible On the Road.

Warren Beatty is filming two biographies, one on Howard Hughes, the other about Radical Journalist John Reed, who witnessed the Russian Revolution in 1917 and wrote about it in Ten Days that Shook the World. One of the most sensational biographies of all involves Joan Crawford's daughter Christina, even now beavering away on a screenplay version of her best-selling assault on Joan, with Anne Bancroft tentatively booked to play Bad Mama. Broadway has not escaped the trend, and there are plans for plays based on the lives of Dorothy Parker, United Mine Workers Czar John L. Lewis, Singer Josephine Baker and Marie Dressier, a star of the '20s and '30s.

There have always been film biographies, of course. Al Jolson's story was done twice while he was still alive, and there have been movies about famous folk like Madame Curie and Benjamin Disraeli. But the voracious appetite for real subjects, particularly on TV, is new, and so is the tendency to tell all without waiting until what was once considered a decent interval has elapsed. "It has to do with people's fascination with public figures," reasons William McCutchen, producer of ABC's Eisenhower TV-movie. "Despite all the tremendously creative ideas that come out of Hollywood, none of them equal what happens in real life. Some of these films can be sensational. There's no doubt about it." Beatty adds: "There are lives that are stranger than fiction."

Immediate exhumation carries certain risks, however. As McCutchen's Ike story shows, it is harder to do Eisenhower, say, than Abraham Lincoln. The film is supposedly taken from Kay Summersby's kiss-and-tell book about her wartime romance with the general, but there will be no kiss and very little tell in ABC'S version. "I've got to think about a very lovely woman who is the widow of the ex-President," McCutchen explains. "We'll leave it to the people who watch the show to make up their own minds as to whether there was a romance."

Poet Allen Ginsberg, a close friend of both Kerouac's and the Cassadys', so objected to the way he was portrayed in the screenplay of Heart Beat that he demanded he be dropped entirely. "They wanted to have someone named Allen Ginsberg speak lines I never said," he says. "I wouldn't have minded if they put something intelligent in my mouth, but it sounded like third-rate beatnik poetry." Adds Novelist Ken Kesey, another friend of the trio: "I believe in dead rights, that no one has a right to mess with a guy, use Humphrey Bogart to sell batteries on TV, just because he's dead."

But so long as Bogart, Cassady, Kerouac and all the rest are not around to complain, they look livelier and livelier to the Hollywood idea men in the age of gossip. Trouble is, complains Rod Steiger, a man who has already portrayed ten historical characters on the screen, including Napoleon and W.C. Fields, the wrong shades are being called back from the dead. "Joan Crawford? That's entertainment value. But go out and try to do the life of Beethoven or Albert Schweitzer or Einstein. You march into a producer's office and say you want to do Einstein, and they'll say, 'Where are the girls?'"

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