I’m one of those people who think a FM movie, particularly one focusing on the band from 1975-87, 1998-2021 would be pretty bad. None of the band wants a real portrayal of what they were (and/or are) actually like. Instead, it would be a dramatization that supported their own selective memories, their own revisionist narratives.
If a movie tackled what the band was actually like recording Rumours and Tusk, for example, it would be a pretty ugly movie, one worth seeing but unflattering and uncomfortable nonetheless. We’d get a window into the worst behavior typified by California pop stardom.
Now what I would love to see is a sensitive, thoughtful movie about Danny Kirwan, a movie that traces his fatherless upbringing through the blues boom and then into Fleetwood Mac, his subsequent deterioration, obscurity, and then homelessness. I think his story is a remarkable one, and it says a lot about the predicament of the artist whose very powers make them sensitive and vulnerable, whose uncanny abilities do not match the skills needed for survival in the commerce-stricken world.
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