Since both Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman have cashed in at the box office in the past 12 months, audiences are about to find out just how many heritage acts have a narrative arc with humble-enough childhoods and sufficiently deep rock bottoms. Michael Bay is combing the Guinness Encyclopedia of Rock & Pop as we speak. And given that the film’s PRs need the surviving band members to do press junkets and turn up on the red carpet, it’s often the manager who’s the softest target in terms of assigning a cinematic antagonist.
And why not? The music-biz manager is a modern Mephistopheles: he turns up in a flash of sulphur, drops a million quid in your lap, says “sign this”, then extracts his diabolic price during 3am cocaine nosebleeds over the next 20 years. Some might say that managers are simply practical business types who are around at the time when vastly overpaid young people are making their own mistakes. And then inevitably get it in the neck from their mathematically illiterate clients who have blown all their cash on sedan chairs.
The latter archetype doesn’t make for a great film plot, however. Instead, the music manager in cinema has a few key attributes, and none of them is “basically a decent bloke”. As these recent examples of real-life managers seen on screen prove …
John Reid
One thing is for sure: they’re going to need more actors who can do a good John Reid. He turns up in Bohemian Rhapsody as Queen’s manager. And he turns up in Rocketman as Elton John’s manager, lover and tormentor, where, short, tubby and balding, Reid has the good fortune to be played by Richard Madden, tipped to be the next James Bond.
Did he get a Hollywood makeover?
If anything, he has been underplayed. Reid allegedly got into a fight with a journalist in a nightclub over “the lack of whisky at a press launch” and was sentenced to a month in jail. In 1984, the day after Elton married Renate Blauel, he apparently beat up another hack; and he once slapped a female hack who reportedly called him a “poof”. Bottom line: he doesn’t like journalists.
Biopic About Another Client Yet to Be Made
Riverdance! Reid managed Michael Flatley, but things went so badly that he paid Reid a million quid as part of a wrongful termination suit.
Doc McGhee
Netflix scored an easy win this year with The Dirt, a film about walking telenovela Mötley Crüe. Their hale and hearty manager, Doc McGhee, also worked with Kiss, Bon Jovi and, briefly, Guns N’ Roses.
Did he get a Hollywood makeover?
What’s the opposite of that? McGhee is introduced into the narrative by slugging a guy at a party. But that didn’t happen. It’s a good lead-in to something else that didn’t happen. McGhee wasn’t sacked because he brought Nikki Sixx’s mother to the hospital where he was recovering from an overdose. In unpleasant reality, the band threw a tantrum because they’d been given a shorter set than Bon Jovi at the Moscow Peace festival.
Biopic About Another Client Yet to Be Made
Let Her Cry: The Hootie & the Blowfish Story.
Albert Grossman
“Rock’n’roll’s Citizen Kane” was a man who blazed bright, then guttered just as quickly. Manager to artists such as Bob Dylan, the Band, Joan Baez and Richie Havens, he opened one of the first folk clubs in America, where, if the audience weren’t paying full attention, they’d be asked to leave.
Did they get a Hollywood makeover?
Not really. Grossman turns up in both the factual documentary Don’t Look Back and Todd Haynes’s Dylan biopic I’m Not There, saying precisely the same thing to a British hotelier: “And you, sir, are one of the dumbest assholes and most stupid persons I’ve ever spoken to in my life.” He also turns up in gruff caricature in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, played by F Murray Abraham. Tetchy and arrogant, Grossman took 25%, when the industry norm was 15. Which, among many other reasons, was why Dylan and the rest of his roster eventually left.
Biopic About Another Client Yet to Be Made
The Gospel According to Peter Paul & Mary.
