Madonna Louise Ciconne has had one of the more eventful American lives of the past half-century, and it is little wonder that she might wish to depict it on screen in a big-budget film. After all, as the recent success of the Queen and Michael Jackson biopics have shown, it doesn’t matter how good the pictures are, as long as they include the best-known songs that made the artists household names and a smattering of the drama that led to their current eminence. Even if, as in Michael, it was the decision to omit most of the really interesting events that led to cries of whitewashing.
Yet there’s been no Madonna biopic, and this is not because she has refused to cooperate. Far from it. Instead, the Material Girl’s main sticking point has been that she wished to write and direct an account of her own life, starring none other than Julia Garner as her younger self, and that it has been stymied by cowardice on the parts of studios who are unable to give her the huge budget and creative control that she has been asking for.
In a recent conversation with Interview magazine, she said that “I was supposed to make a movie about my life. I worked on my script for two years and spent two years at Universal Studios with the line producers doing budgeting and casting. We had a falling out, me and Universal, regarding budget because I needed – I’ve had an extraordinary life. I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget.” The film has been rumored for a considerable time, with Garner going through a grueling ‘Madonna boot camp’ at which she sang and danced and struck poses to get the role. But since then, tumbleweed.
“We had a falling out, me and Universal, regarding budget”
Madonna’s version of events is that she has bent over backwards to work with Universal, even down to offering to film in Serbia (Serbia!) to save money, but that this was met with skepticism. Still, as she told Interview, “My whole life has been survival. I’m not going there for a holiday.” This politely ignores the rejected scripts (including one by Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody), suggestions that Madonna might not be the easiest collaborator and the fact that she is, to put it mildly, untested as a director. She has made two feature films to date, the low-budget British comedy Filth and Wisdom and the Wallis Simpson-Edward VIII drama W.E. Both were panned by critics and commercial flops, suggesting that her undoubted talents do not lie in filmmaking.
It is no coincidence that Madonna is about to release a new album next week, the Stuart Price-produced Confessions II, and that she is on the publicity trail in the hope that this will be the record that takes the now 67-year-old artist back into the mainstream of contemporary pop. Its title is a tacit acknowledgement that the last Madonna album that the public cared about was 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, and with various younger artists borrowing her moves, stage persona and unchecked ambition, she is keen to get back into the mainstream and show the young pretenders who’s boss. It is this, perhaps, that she should be concentrating on, rather than attempting, hubristically, to sabotage what could be a brilliant and provocative account of her eventful life.
Still, there is a strange but amusing coda to this. The second series of Seth Rogen’s The Studio, coming next year, is widely believed to feature a two-part episode revolving around the abortive Madonna biopic, featuring both Garner and La Ciccone and showcasing the diva’s return to acting after nearly a quarter of a century. While The Studio plays Hollywood egos for laughs, it is somehow serendipitous that this exercise in ‘what might have been’ is getting an outing on screen after all – even if it’s not quite clear who the joke is on, after all.
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