Eddie Cochran (L) & Gene Vincent (R).
I first became interested in the story of 50s rock and roll singer Gene Vincent sometime around 1990-91. Of course I knew the song “Be Bop A Lula” – almost everyone does. But I had no idea about the epic tragedy that constituted the life of this somewhat obscure but very influential star.
I was going out with a girl called Judy, who turned me onto rockabilly – we did the hair, the clothes and the car thing, and hung around on the periphery of the small but devoted Rockabilly scene in Adelaide. The wilfully retrograde attitudes and attention to period detail made you feel like you were in a movie, but some of the purist attitudes to the genre were amusingly extreme. (A typical quote: “If it happened after 1959, I don’t wanna know about it.”)
What struck me most, though, was the music – it was like a direct line back from punk – raw, crude, often amateurish, aggressive, sexy and dark.
The image of Gene Vincent – hunch-backed, leather-clad, wild-eyed and greasy-haired – epitomised for me the dark underbelly of 50s rock and roll – a loooong way away from Happy Days and the whitebread crooners. (I’d also been blown away a few years previously by David Lynch’s revolutionary deployment of old 50s songs in Blue Velvet – he had accessed the sinister undertones of those songs about love that you had always felt were there but never quite heard with such sharp focus.)
Around this time a friend of mine, Grant Lee Sullivan (now sadly passed away), gave me a copy of a UK bio of Gene called “The Day The World Turned Blue” written by Britt Hagarty in the mid 80s. What a story! The tragic, Shakespearean arc of Gene’s life had me hooked. I was pretty much obsessed with his story from that point on, and the idea about writing a screenplay based on his life took hold then and there.
Cut to: 10 YEARS LATER.
In 2002, I saw Susan Van Hecke’s biography “Race With The Devil: Gene Vincent’s Life In The Fast Lane” at Minotaur Books here in Melbourne, and had to buy it. It rekindled instantly my desire to write a screenplay about Gene, primarily because Susan had chosen the same title for her book as I’d always imagined for my screenplay (it’s the title of one of his early songs, and what else are you gonna call a bio about Gene? It says it all.)
God bless the internet – I cast around trying to work out a way to contact Susan, and eventually arrived at the Gene Vincent Discussion Group via The Rockabilly Hall of Fame site’s Gene Vincent page.
UK Gene authority (and interviewee for Susan’s book) Derek Henderson, who runs the discussion group, kindly forwarded my request on to Susan, who got back to me very promptly – sometime in late 2002.
I outlined to her in an email my desire to write a screenplay using her book as the main research material, and I think my take on the story convinced her. (She recently told me that, having been burned by film production companies before, she was all set to give me an uncategorical “NO”. I’m glad she didn’t).
I set about underlining in pencil all the sections of the bio that I thought were the most dramatic (as well as bits of The Day The World Turned Blue and a couple of bios on Eddie Cochran, Gene’s best friend – the script is something of a dark ‘buddy’ picture) and wrote them up in a kind of first-draft-cum-scrapbook, also incorporating many of the scene ideas I’d had gestating in my head for close to a decade.
The result was less than good; very stock standard in fact, but what it did was give me a single source from which to develop the story. It was merely a collection of events; I had yet to discover the underlying stuff that had hooked me to this story on a subconscious level.
I ended up sending Susan this rough first draft, just to show her I was sincere in my efforts. She soon got back to me, and admitted she thought my first draft was shit, but she admired any writer with enough balls to send such an embryonic work in progress to another writer. Her candour kicked off what proved to be a very close and fruitful back-and-forth about the story.
Once I was on the right track, it soon came time to confess to Sue that I didn’t have a cent to purchase the rights to her book, but we hit upon a mutually satisfactory agreement, whereby she would transfer the rights to adapt the screenplay and approach producers with it, in return for which I would cut her in for a percentage of any eventual screenplay sale. I’m not sure how common such an arrangement is, but it’s not without precedent in the industry.
I wanted the script to have some of the feel of biopics like “Raging Bull” and “Lenny”, both of which have a gritty darkness to them that I admire, as well as unsympathetic protagonists. Sometimes I’d write sitting in front of the TV, on which I’d play both these films with the sound turned down, as if peering over the screen of my laptop at the images might somehow permeate the rhythm and tone of my writing.
I was also fortunate enough to have some brilliant guidance in the form of my good friend and fellow screen scribe Stuart Page, who acted as an informal script editor, and badgered me constantly with the dreaded question ‘What’s it about?’ until I though I was going insane.
Quite late in the process, I contacted Gene Vincent’s daughter, Sherri, via the same fan website that kicked this whole thing off. From my correspondence with her, it became apparent that Sherri had been involved in some bitter legal disputes over Gene’s estate throughout the years, and had recently won the right to be the guardian of his memory. Which meant if this project was ever to have a hope of being made, it would have to be with her approval, or it’d be a music biopic with no music (at the very least).
However, she was very supportive of the project, but I must confess to a real sense of trepidation when I finally dropped a copy of the finished screenplay into the mail for her to read – what if she hated it?
It took a while for her to read it, which gave me several restless weeks (months, in fact) – but her comments were all I could have wished for. She does not labour under the misapprehension that her father was an angel, but I was gratified that she found the script moving and meaningful.
She also agreed to help push the project in any way she can. The one thing I (correctly) surmised was that she’d be disappointed that my screenplay totally ellided the years between 1960 and 1971, when she was born. But, with an incredibly generous spirit, she acknowledged that the script was my baby (even though she’s Gene’s baby) – and that I should write what I believe in.
The other great thing that came out of this project was winning 2nd Prize in the 2004 Nashville Screenwriters Conference script competition. I knew that I’d made life difficult for myself by picking an American-based story for my first feature film, (what with me not living in Los Angeles and all), but it was the story that had the hook deepest in me at that time.
Once I wrote it, I figured I’d take a gamble and enter it into a few US screenwriting competitions, to see if I could win and generate interest in the script that way. Luckily, the Nashville competition had a special category for music-themed films, which I thought was a good way to further narrow the odds. What was also attractive was the fact that part of the prize was the winning scripts would be sent to about 20 production companies in the US, including HBO, Lion’s Gate and Plan B. All that hard submission work would be done for me.
The gamble paid off, although the script was deemed by the production companies who read it to be ‘too dark’, or ‘not quite the kind of thing we do’, even though many of them loved it. But all those rejection letters with impressive letterheads make me feel like a real writer. (I also got to travel to Nashville the following year, and attend the 2005 Nashville Screenwriters Conference as a aspecial guest, which I’ll write about in another post.)
That was a few years ago, now. But ‘Race With The Devil’ is far from dead. My passion for the project remains undiminished, I keep looking for possible avenues to send it to, and I know it’s only a matter of time before it passes beneath the gaze of someone who sees the potential in it for a music biopic as great as recent successes like ‘Control’ or ‘Walk The Line’.
