We were pretty excited when a Jerry Garcia biopic was announced. Heck, it’d be a juicy role for the always-deserving Adam Goldberg. However, according to JamBase.com, said film now may not happen, as members of Garcia’s family and Grateful Dead Productions are refusing to be involved with the project.
The film, to be directed by Amir Bar-Lev (The Tillman Story and My Kid Could Paint That), was going to be focused on Garcia’s early years before joining the Dead. The official statement from both parties made it clear that Grateful Dead Productions and Jerry Garcia Family LLC (see, families are like companies) would not be “licensing any recordings from Grateful Dead or Jerry Garcia’s music library for this production.” On top of that, none of Garcia’s family members agreed to work with Bar-Lev and company. Without this crucial source material, the doc (which is also based on Robert Greenfield’s 1997 oral history Dark Star) seems like it’s dead in the water. That is, of course, unless they focus on Garcia cover songs from the same time frame, as reported by Variety.
As always, we’ll let you know if anything actually transpires.
