Fin: Brian Wilson and the movies
Plus, Spaceballs 2, the death of a great character actor, broadcasting lifetime achievement awards, how I fill my water bottle, and more in this week’s notes column.
This week we lost Brian Wilson, the legendary founder of The Beach Boys, at age 81.
Wilson was one of the greatest performers, songwriters, and producers in the history of American popular music. He overcame endless adversity and made countless comebacks. He was responsible for some of the greatest songs in history, some of them very different from others.
I met Brian Wilson once, just over ten years ago, at the press conference at South by Southwest for Love &Mercy, the 2015 biopic in which Paul Dano and John Cusack played Wilson in the 1960s and 1990s, respectively, and Paul Giamatti added to his collection of music-industry biopic villains at Eugene Landy.
The film was directed by Bill Pohlad, a scion of the family that owns the Minnesota Twins, and I got to have a “what the hell did you trade Jay Buhner for?” moment with him after the press conference.
Love & Mercy, while certainly coming from the point of view of the people (most notably, Wilson’s wife) who produced it, is one of the century’s better music biopics, especially in the way it showed the recording studio process. I listened to “Pet Sounds” while writing my review at that festival, and I remember it being all I listened to for weeks.
The Beach Boys’ music was also well-used by the movies over the years, with Wilson’s greatest composition, “God Only Knows,” showing up everywhere from Boogie Nights to Love Actually to the opening credits of the HBO show Big Love.
Wilson and the band have also had plenty of movies made about them. The documentary back in 2021, Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, is fairly decent, much more so than The Beach Boys, last year, which is pretty much Mike Love’s version of events.
RIP to Brian Wilson.
The Schwartz Awakens
Mel Brooks made it official this week: There’s going to be a sequel to Spaceballs, his 1987 parody of Star Wars. The 98-year-old Brooks will appear in the film, although he won’t direct; Bill Pullman is on board to return, as is Rick Moranis, who had been in a supposedly permanent retirement since the late ‘90s and declined to return for any of the later-day Ghostbusters sequels.
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