There has never been a real Janis Joplin movie. Think about that. Freddy Mercury has a movie. Elton John has a movie. Elvis has a movie. Ray Charles has a movie. Johnny Cash has a movie. Judy Garland has a movie. Tina Turner has a movie. Every major figure of American popular music from the 20th century has a scripted biopic.
A film where an actor or actress stands at a microphone and attempts with varying degrees of success to embody what that person was. Janis Joplin does not have a movie. Hollywood has been trying to make one for 50 years. This is the story of why it hasn’t happened and what it tells us about the specific problem of being Janis Joplin.
The first serious attempt started almost immediately after her death. In the early 1970s, various producers and studios began circling the story. The material was obviously cinematic. Port Arthur, San Francisco, Monterey, Big Brother, Cheap Thrills, The Voice, The Southern Comfort, The Feather Boa, The Porsche painted with the history of the universe, the death at 27.
The life of Janis Joplin contained more movie-ready material than most screenwriters invent in a career. The problem presented itself almost immediately. Who plays her? In 1979, the closest thing to a Janis Joplin biopic arrived in theaters. It was called The Rose. The screenplay was originally titled Pearl and was explicitly based on Janis Joplin’s life.
The trajectory from Texas outsider to rock star to death at 27. The specific details barely disguised. The producers obtained a different title when they could not get the rights to call it Janis or Pearl. Bette Midler played the lead. She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
The film was a considerable success, and it was not a Janis Joplin biopic. It was a film inspired by Janis Joplin starring one of the most talented performers of her generation doing her best to channel something she could get close to but not quite reach. Because what she was trying to channel was not a style or a performance or a set of mannerisms, it was a voice, and the voice was unrepeatable.
This is the central problem. Read that sentence again. The voice is unrepeatable. Every musical biopic faces the question of the voice. How do you handle the singing? The options are use the original recordings, have the actress mime while the originals play, use a professional singer to dub the acting, or have the actress actually sing.
For most musical biopics, one of these options works. For Judy Garland, Renée Zellweger won the Oscar for Judy using her own voice, and the result was sufficient. For Freddie Mercury, Rami Malek’s performance used a combination of real recordings and a professional singer, and audiences accepted it.
For Tina Turner, Angela Bassett mimed to Tina’s own recordings and delivered one of the great performances in the genre. The Janis Joplin problem is different in kind, not just degree. Because what Janis Joplin’s voice did cannot be explained as technique, it cannot be learned, it cannot be approximated by even the most gifted vocal performer because it was not a set of techniques to be learned.
It was the sound of a specific wound meeting a specific instrument, the Port Arthur rejection meeting a voice that happened to be capable of expressing that rejection at full volume with nothing held back. No actress can fake that. Not because they are not talented enough, because the wound is not theirs.
The attempts kept coming through the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s. Various combinations of directors, screenwriters, producers, and actresses were attached to Janis Joplin biopics that never made it to production. Laura Joplin, Janis’s younger sister who co-wrote the memoir Love Janis and has been one of the primary guardians of her sister’s legacy, was a constant presence in these negotiations. She read scripts.
She met directors. She evaluated what each project would do with her sister’s story, and she said no to most of them. Not because she wanted to protect a sanitized version of who Janis was. Laura Joplin’s memoir is honest about the addiction, the loneliness, the complexity of who her sister was.
She is not trying to protect a myth. She was trying to protect the reality. And the reality she discovered was almost impossible to put into a screenplay without reducing it to exactly the elements that made it seem like a movie. The excess, the death, the legend at the expense of the thing that actually mattered.
The thing that mattered was the voice. And no screenplay can contain the voice. In 2015, Amy Berg made a documentary called Janis: Little Girl Blue. It used archive footage, photographs, letters, and interviews with people who knew her. It was authorized by the estate. It used her actual recordings. It is by the consensus of everyone who has seen it and who knew Janis Joplin, the closest thing to a real portrait of who she was because it contained the actual voice, not an actress attempting to reproduce the voice.
Advertisements
The voice itself, the Monterey footage, the Cheap Thrills recordings, the Pearl sessions, the Dick Cavett interviews, Amy Berg had found the solution to the biopic problem by making something that was not a biopic. She had made a film where Janis Joplin plays herself, which is the only cast that works.
The biopic attempts have continued after 2015. New names are attached periodically. New directors express interest. New studios announce development deals. None of them have made it to production because the problem has not changed. The voice is unrepeatable and the life, when you actually look at it, is not reducible to the kind of narrative arc that biopics require, the rise, the fall, the redemption, the lesson.
The life of Janis Joplin does not have a redemption. It does not have a lesson. It has a voice that stopped the world and a person who was never quite able to make the world stop hurting her and 4 years of giving everything she had to every room she walked into and an end that came too soon.
That is not a three-act structure. That is a life. Hollywood keeps trying to turn it into a three-act structure because that is what Hollywood knows how to do. It has not worked yet. It may never work. Here is the irony at the center of this story. Janis Joplin is one of the most inherently cinematic figures in the history of American music.
Her life is visually rich, emotionally intense, narratively eventful. The settings, Port Arthur, Haight-Ashbury, Monterey, Woodstock, Madison Square Garden, the Landmark Motor Hotel, are iconic. The supporting cast is extraordinary. The story arc, however short, is real and yet the film has not been made because the thing that made Janis Joplin who she was, the voice, is the one thing a film cannot contain.
The Pearl album was released 4 months after she died. It went to number one. It is still one of the greatest records ever made. It is, in a sense, the film that was never made. The record she made in the weeks before her death, knowing it was the best thing she had ever done. The performances that contain everything that every biopic has been trying to find for 50 years, she is in it.
All of her. The real version. The voice that cannot be replicated on tape in the performances that were her final statement. Hollywood cannot make the Janis Joplin movie because the Janis Joplin movie already exists. It is on vinyl. It is on your streaming service. It is 11 tracks and a silence. Pearl. She made it herself.
Here is what this story asks you. Is there something about a person you loved or admired or were changed by that cannot be captured in any medium except the medium they actually worked in? Hollywood has been trying for 50 years to put Janis Joplin into a film. Janis Joplin put herself into a record.
The record is still there. The film is still unfinished. Some things can only be done in one form, by one person, once. That is what the voice is. That is what Pearl is. The biopic Hollywood cannot make is the proof. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.
