Musicians Who Deserve Their Own Movies

It seems like the musical biopic has really been picking up steam in recent years. From Bob Dylan to the Notorious B.I.G. to the Runaways to N.W.A. to Queen, it seems like there's no iconic musician whose rise to fame just wasn't interesting enough to be dramatized by Hollywood. It kind of makes sense. It's a lot easier to write a screenplay when 90 percent of the narrative is already laid out for you, and perhaps more than any other variety of celebrity, the lives and relationships of rock stars have always been a source of fascination for regular, non-rock star people.

Consider, however, that some of the more interesting stories in the annals of music history have yet to receive the big-screen treatment. If any big-time Hollywood screenwriters happen to be reading this, we've done half your job for you by presenting this handy list of musicians who really need to get their own biopics. You're welcome — extravagant gift baskets will be accepted as thanks.

Musical pioneers always make for good biopic fodder, and you can't pioneer much harder than Black Sabbath did. Formed in 1968 as the Polka Tulk Blues Band (no, really) the boys changed their moniker to the slightly-less-ridiculous Earth, and were blues-ing it up around Birmingham when fate intervened. Guitarist Tony Iommi suffered an industrial accident that de-tipped the fingers of his fretting hand, a career-ending injury for any guitarist — but he compensated by tuning his axe down a half-step to provide some slack, resulting in a sound nobody had quite heard before. Then, singer Ozzy Osbourne and bassist Geezer Butler penned a dark, scary tune entitled "Black Sabbath" — and suddenly, heavy metal kicked (hard) in the womb.

The band would go on to lay down metal's founding documents while puzzling critics, enraging anyone with religious leanings, and doing roughly all of the drugs. There's almost too much material for a biopic here; Osbourne's exploits alone are legendary, from snorting ants to biting heads off things to generally being a complete madman. His leaving the band for a stellar solo career, along with the tragic death of his guitarist Randy Rhoads, could provide strong dramatic beats, and the tenure of vocalist Ronnie James Dio in Sabbath deserves examination as well (plus, you know you're dying to see who they'd cast in that role). Osbourne's triumphant return to the band at 1997's Ozzfest could cap the whole thing off. We don't need a dramatization of Ozzy's reality show years.

The raucous, booze-soaked early years of famous bands always make for good biopic material, and not many bands were more booze-soaked and raucous than Metallica, who earned the nickname "Alcoholica" before most of the world even knew who the musicians were. They invented thrash metal as teenagers, dropping perhaps the most aggressive musical style anyone had yet seen right on the world's face, and somehow parlayed that into becoming the biggest band on Earth. Along the way, there were plenty of dramatic beats — because, as the documentary Some Kind of Monster showed us, the personalities in the band tend toward the petulant and dysfunctional.

This was a band full of flagrant drunks who kicked out guitarist (and future Megadeth frontman) Dave Mustaine for drinking too much. Their steady rise was threatened by a horrific bus accident that claimed the life of original bassist Cliff Burton, and replacement Jason Newsted was in constant conflict with the other members, to the point that his contribution to 1988's ...And Justice For All was mixed so low as to be nearly inaudible. And just when it seemed like they'd gotten as mainstream as a thrash metal band could get, they hooked up with producer Bob Rock for 1991's Metallica (colloquially known as the Black Album) — which, with its slightly more accessible sound, sold roughly eleventy-billion copies and made them international superstars. And we can probably just close out the biopic there, because the band got a lot less dramatic once they sobered up.

Let's get this straight right now: Phil Collins is a freaking legend. If you only know him for making you wonder what the hell a "Sussudio" is, then you're Collins-ing all wrong. He's one of the most respected drummers in rock; he manned the skins for Genesis, a wildly inventive prog-rock band with drum parts that would make lesser drummers put their heads right through their snares. Then, when lead singer Peter Gabriel left and took his uber-distinctive voice with him, Collins stepped up to sing lead — and not only killed it, but took Genesis from proggy weirdos to one of the biggest pop bands of the '80s.

Of course, we all know that he then went on to an arguably even more successful solo career. But did you know that he helped invent the gated snare drum sound (first employed on Gabriel's "Intruder") which practically defined the '80s? He did, and it's part of what makes perhaps the single most memorable bar of drumming ever (on "In the Air Tonight," of course) so memorable. He was the only artist to play at both Live Aid concerts, performing a solo set in London before hopping on a Concorde to go sing some more songs and also sit in on drums for Led freakin' Zeppelin in Philadelphia. He's a consummate professional, is badass in unexpected ways, and has more career highlights than you can shake a stick at — and still, he gets no respect. A biopic entitled Phil Collins is Awesome could remedy this in a hurry.

The great part about a David Bowie biopic? It'd be like six different biopics in one. We could start off with his early years playing around in local bands under his real name Davy Jones before he changed it to avoid confusion with the Monkee of the same name. After a first solo album went nowhere, he spent a while at a Buddhist monastery, and then formed his own mime troupe — and we haven't even gotten to the really interesting parts yet.

Throughout the 1970s, Bowie made a habit of completely overhauling his image every time fans started to think they had him pinned down. The spacy image of his first three albums gave way to full-on alienhood in the form of perhaps his most famous persona, Ziggy Stardust. That lasted all of a year before he glammed it up for his next couple releases. Then, a segue into his slick, businesslike Thin White Duke persona in the late '70s, a period during which he scored his first #1 U.S. hit ("Fame," co-written with John Lennon). Finally, in the early '80s, he decided "screw it," and became a full-fledged pop star, recruiting the legendary Stevie Ray Vaughn to play lead guitar on the monster smash hit album Let's Dance — which is a good place to wrap up the story, and as good a name for his biopic as any. It's a little less unwieldy than The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Since Bohemian Rhapsody was so successful, a Bowie-focused movie has been announced, but the movie will likely not have any of Bowie's music or the family's blessing. Hrmm.

Layne Staley grew up wanting to be a musician, and was playing drums in bands as early as 12. It seemed like music was his destiny from the outset, but the first incarnation of his band Alice in Chains was a bit different from the outfit we know and love. After guitarist Jerry Cantrell caught Staley singing at a local show, the pair formed "Alice N' Chains" in the late '80s in an attempt to score some of that sweet hair-metal cash. As the music scene started to shift and become all dvmmoms-y in the early '90s, the band corrected the spelling of their name and steered their music in a darker direction — helped along by the fact that Staley and Cantrell's harmonies sounded really, really creepy in a cool way.

Staley's biopic would have to focus on the band's unbelievably meteoric rise, as they came to dominate hard rock and Staley became known as one of the more original and influential vocalists of the genre. Of course, the third act would veer hard into Cautionary Tale territory. As early as 1993, Staley was exhibiting symptoms of the intense drug addiction that would eventually cost him his life in 2002. But he was a singer with inauspicious beginnings who rose to cement a towering legacy before losing it all to drugs, and if that isn't the classic rock 'n' roll story, what is?