Competing Bob Marley Movies Clash Over Music Rights

Despite the involvement of Bob Marley's widow, the planned Weinstein Co. biopic about the reggae icon has hit a road block acquiring the music rights to Marley's catalogue. Martin Scorsese's Marley documentary has already licensed the songs and has the support of the Marley family-owned Tuff Gong Pictures. "Martin Scorsese doesn't want to go out with a competing project," said Chris Blackwell, president of Marley's music publisher Blue Mountain Music. Scorsese's documentary was set for release in February 6th, 2010, which would have been Marley's sixty-fifth birthday, while the Weinstein biopic, based on Rita Marley's biography No Woman No Cry: My Life With Bob Marley, was due out late 2009. Rita was to executive produce the biopic, while son Ziggy Marley is producing the Scorsese biopic. "All our efforts and support are currently directed toward the documentary," said Ziggy. "We believe that this project is the best way to represent our father's life from his perspective, and any other film project pertaining to our father will be empty without his music to support it."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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