I don’t know much about the late country star Hank Williams but his death at the age of 29 only proves even more than musicians that die young tend to become legends greater than when they were alive, Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis to name a few. But if you’re a musician, please don’t go down that road just so you can get a quick success… because you won’t be able to enjoy it if you’re dead.
According to Variety, Nashville-based 821 Entertainment Group and Strike Entertainment will collaborate to bring the story of HANK WILLIAMS to the big screen. Marc Abraham will write the script using the book HANK WILLIAMS: THE BIOGRAPHY by Colin Escott as a source. Hank Williams estate allows them to use most of his memorable recordings.
You can read most of what Hanks Williams was all about over at Wikipedia but let me just say that his rise from poverty, his fame and fortune journey, and his drug abuse are the stuff that a biopic movie typically relies on.
Here’s the official synopsis of the book..
In his brief life, Hank Williams created one of the defining bodies of American music. Songs such as ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart,’ ‘Hey, Good Lookin’,’ and ‘Jambalaya’ sold millions of records and became the model for virtually all country music that followed. But by the time of his death at age 29, Williams had drunk and drugged and philandered his way through two messy marriages and out of his headline spot on the Grand Ole Opry. Even though he was country music’s top seller, Williams was so famously unreliable toward the end that he was lucky to get a booking in a beer hall. Now Colin Escott adds the fruit of several years of impeccable new research to what was already the most full-blooded portrait of Hank Williams. With the benefit of recently discovered legal files, exclusive access to Williams’s autopsy, and new research on the singer’s final hours, Escott brings to light much that was previously unknown or hidden about Hank Williams.
