AFM: Ewan McGregor, Zoe Saldana Join Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis Biopic and it’s been a while.
This should be about as good as it could be. Who else could do a decent Miles?
Cheadle is a great choice.
The first other person that comes to mind is Mos Def, who I believe now goes by Yassiin Bey.
Boy do I hope this works - Miles is at the top of the 20th century, alongside Louis Armstrong, Sinatra, Dylan, The Beatles - it would be great to see him captured in a worthy movie…
I’ve been anticipating this project for years, ever since I first heard it was being considered. It stalled out within a year of its first announcement because of various snags. Money mostly, I believe.
Anyway, it might be fun to try to cast the obvious characters who have to be involved in any decent telling of the story.
Who can play:
Coltrane
Bill Evans
Gil Evans
Mulligan
Bird
Clark Terry
Dizzy
Cicely Tyson
Name some others.
Never mind all this! It would appear that the time frame of the movie, according to this article is
So whether the early years even get mentioned may be too iffy to get into any guesswork. Probably a smart move, in light of the casting issues – for starters.
In reading the bit in your link, it is NOT a biopic - it only covers a specific period “when Miles reclaims his music” (?) - so it is not clear which important folk will be in the mix. If it’s the era of Bitches Brew, it would be very different than his late 50’s Cool Jazz era…
That’s for sure. The many phases and fads that jazz went through under Miles’s influence would be hard to cram into a 2- or 3-hour movie. It takes a big book!
I have my own favorite periods and most are in the early days. But an audience today probably needs less schooling on Davis’s contribution to American music and more on his personal demons.
One thing looks certain: it won’t be another Bird (1988) which may have put the old tin lid on jazz biopics.
I’m going to hate this movie. I can see Cheadle shucking and jiving and being a big ol’ sambo Uncle Tom throughout the whole thing.
Just kidding, it sounds awesome!
I hear you! Cheadle won my admiration in the first flic I saw him in: Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) and I really liked his work in Out of Sight (1998) and since those days he’s been in dozens of top-flight movies.
As soon as I heard he was even interested in the Miles project I was convinced it would be about as close to Miles (of liner notes and biographies fame) as anybody could come.
Just curious, Nzinga, Seated, if you could point to anything he’s done that had any of those characteristics you mentioned. 
I think Don Cheadle as Miles is brilliant casting!
In a similar vein, there’s a bunch of us on Facebook trying to get Johnny Depp interested in playing Lenny Breau in a Lenny Breau bio-pic…
Fantastic idea! I would want to see that. Have you seen the YouTube things on Lenny’s life? I can’t find it today, but not long ago there was a multi-part documentary with some good stuff.
Lenny was so far ahead of everybody. The closest to him these days is Tommy Emmanuel.
I’m looking forward to it. I didn’t think Bird was all that bad, and Let’s Get Lost was fascinating in a ‘you can’t look away from the train wreck’ that was Chet Baker sort of way.