Jonah Hill will play Jerry García in a film about the mythical Californian band, an icon of the hippie community
Martin Scorsese doesn’t stop. He has just finished filming -very complicated- of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, and is already preparing a new project, a film about the mythical Californian band of the 60s and 70s Grateful Dead, a folk rock group with psychedelic tints, an icon of the hippie community.
Scorsese is not a newcomer to the world of music: he was one of the cameras that filmed the legendary Woodstock Festival in 1969, and as a director he was the creator of another unforgettable musical documentary, ‘The Last Waltz’, about another group from the Costa American West, The Band. In other types of music he has directed ‘New York,’ New York ‘and produced and directed numerous video clips such as Michael Jackson’s, and documentaries about jazz and the hippie counterculture, such as the documentary series’ Long Strange Trip’, which is premiered at Sundance or ‘Once Were Brothers: The Story of The Band’.
The Grateful Dead began their career in Palo Alto, California, under the name The Warlocks, which they had to change to get a record deal because another band (the future The Velvet Underground) was already recording under that name. They settled in San Francisco in 1965, where bands such as Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and The Holding Company, Santana, and The Band emerged in parallel to them, which established San Francisco as the capital of the hippie counterculture of the time. Of all these bands, the members of the Grateful Dead were those that enjoyed the highest musical level, including Jerry Garcia on guitar, banjo and singer, blues musician Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan on harmonica and organ, bassist Phil Lesh. (from classical music) and Bill Kreutzmann on drums, heavily influenced by jazz bebop. It was a group that sold millions of records around the world and staged unforgettable massive concerts.
Martin Scorsese with the Rolling Stones in 2008, during the promotion of ‘Shine a Light’.
The end of the group came with the death of Jerry García, a musician with a Galician background, its undisputed leader and its reason for being. He was a charismatic, complex character, who combined the highly resonant composition and performance of his music with an often self-destructive personal life full of excesses, drugs, financial failures, and three broken marriages. Although García died in August 1995, his health had been very deteriorated for two decades, so the group was spacing out recordings and performances. After García’s death, the remaining members of the group dissolved the band, although it would still meet again on the occasion of a tribute concert to its disappeared leader.
Scorsese has cast Jonah Hill to play Jerry Garcia; Scorsese and Hill had wanted to work together again for a long time since ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ in 2013, the film that earned the actor his Oscar nomination for best supporting actor in his role as young Donnie Azoff. Both will also participate as producers in this project. The film’s script will be signed by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who have worked together on various occasions: ‘American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson ‘,’ Ed Wood ‘,’ The Larry Flynt Scandal ‘and’ Big Eyes’.
Actor Jonah Hill will charm Jerry Garcia.
The film about the Grateful Dead will be produced by Apple, which has acquired the rights to the group’s catalog, with Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann, members of the band, as executive producers, along with the daughter of Jerry Garcia, Trixie, and the group manager. The filming of Apple’s latest collaboration with Scorsese has been on ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’. In it he has counted again with Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Jesse Plemons. In addition, DiCaprio and Scorsese will soon be working together again on a biographical drama about the figure of President Roosevelt, a character about whom a two-part miniseries has also just been shot.
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