In many recent interviews Cher has been lamenting over and over how impossibly unwieldy screenwriters are finding her life story to be, how this has prevented the movie from proceeding.

This is so majorly NOMB, but…

I have thought about this problem of the biopic over the years (anyone’s biopic) and specifically Cher’s meandering case, if only in the daydreaming realm.

And I’m so not trying to be a Nicolas Hyams here. I have no desire to contribute to this biopic project or write Cher’s story for the screen. I don’t feel this is one of my missions in life; and these thoughts below are just in the spirit of brainstorming.

One of the best biopics of someone like Cher was probably done by Barbra Streisand playing Fanny Brice in the movies Funny Girl and Funny Lady, another prototypical song and dance heroine navigating life in the big show biz.

However, on a recent Graham Norton episode, Cher recently stated her distaste for any kind of serial version of her story, like Julia Roberts’ miniseries suggestion. Although that was handled super amazingly well in the mini-series Fosse/Verdon.

A TV miniseries doesn’t have the opulence of a motion picture.

So if you simply must contain the Cher story in one movie, even say a 2.5 hour movie, I would imagine you would have to do what Joyce Carol Oates calls synecdoche, having one thing symbolize the many things. In her MasterClass Joyce Carol Oates talked about novelizing the life of Marilyn Monroe and the example was that one of her abortions stood for something like eight of them in total. There was no need to talk about each one. In Cher’s case that would be husbands/lovers, records, tours and movies.

You simply can’t address this life literally in a movie-amount of time.

In the movie Lincoln they used one heroic political (and miliary) battle to represent Lincoln’s entire life. I don’t think you could do that with Cher because of the mutli-faceted nature of her career. Liconln was mainly a politician. One political battle could stand for them all. But Cher has no single battle that wouldn’t neglect entire swaths of who she is and what she’s done.

Like Silkwood for example, a  representative battle for sure but telling the story of the making of Silkwood is without the world of pop music and precludes the large sub-story of Sonny. Similarly, the movie Coal Miners Daughter tells the story of a lifetime and music career through the lens of one marriage, but that doesn’t work for Cher either because she went on to have a life beyond her life with Sonny.

And I want to say an autobiography as book is exactly the time and place to address a life in a literal way and should do so. It should include experiences of every man, friend, family member, record, movie and tour.  It can be War and Peace, and in Cher’s case it probably should be (if anyone’s should). Infinite Jest it up. Mark Twain’s autobiography is two 700+ page volumes and he didn’t know Phil Spector.

It can be Lord of the Rings, each book a veritable epoch.

A movie can only contain so much, can only tell a simple story, a stripped-down, simplified version of reality, say two symbolic men: the Svengali-type and the boy-toy type and the tension between the two. The story isn’t about Cher’s children, (they have their own life story to tell), but can have a few scenes about Chaz and Elijah in regards to the tension between parenting and a career in entertainment.

And I keep focusing on tension because a movie has to have one archetypical struggle. And I think in Cher’s life that struggle is not “working through fear” as it was in the Broadway show. Although that’s part of it, for sure. It’s just not big enough. Because what caused the fear to manifest in the first place over and over again?

It was, I would suggest, that bulwark of intimidating judgement. Judgement from the establishment of Hollywood and the establishment of rock music. Judgement from fellow compatriots scratching out an existence in show business. The judgement of Cher upon herself.

It’s looking deep inside and admitting what you’ve have to prove to the world. That’s the thread. Because maybe everyone else would have just capitulated at the threshold of that fear. Why keep going?

The central idea is that fight for legitimacy and respect. If only because the story arc goes from lack of it to an overabundance, the fight against being seen as a joke.

And how Cher turned that around over a very long period of time, over a whole lifetime.

And maybe the movie ends right at the precipice of legend-hood, right before she steps onto the stage of respect and standing ovation. The moment bigger than the biggest hit or the Academy Award, some symbolic stage of acceptance.

After all, we all know what comes after. We’re all here for it.

It’s not about the songs, movies, co-stars or husbands as they stand individually. It’s about one person’s struggle to get from 1946 to 2023 in show business and battling the snobs and hipsters. And not just as a woman (although that’s part of it) but as a human being.

The movie can even show how it was never about reinvention but about a consistent self evolving and dealing with the constant assumption of a cynical reinvention. It’s really about self-actualization and the friends and men along the way who helped or did not help.

All told with representative, partially-fictional character mashups. Because sometimes to tell a concise truth, you need to fictionalize the elements.

It’s taken Cher full lifetime to achieve her turnaround from lack of respect to her current top-of-the-heap status. It’s quite extraordinary. And so I feel the movie should be a life story, not just a representative-event story.

Even the music could be mashups of unlikely combined songs. The Broadway show worked with this a bit with medleys and songs placed out of context. But truly bizarre mashups of old songs threaded into surprising new songs reflects more how Cher’s career has come to pass in this most recent decade, her old rediscovered material playing beside her new material. We watch Moonstruck or Good Times mashed-up beside Christmas  and “Believe.”

A biopic doesn’t need to be literal and maybe shouldn’t be. It can have characters designed to represent ideas and common experiences.

Possibly the creators of this effort have thought about all of this already and they’re still stuck. But there are very good life stories out there. It can be done.

 

Anyway, this may be my last post of the year due to some illnesses in my family.  So if we don’t talk until the New Year, have a Merry Christmas, a happy holiday season and a very, very Happy New Year.

I’ll try to wrap up all the remaining Christmas album festivities next year.

I leave you with these two songs as a season’s greetings: “honest men know that revenge does not taste sweet” and “just follow the day and reach for the sun.”