The Future Cinema - Filming starts on Tom Waits' biopic. Read the crucial correspondence that made it happen...

Editor's Note:This blog is not normally concerned with Hollywood gossip but this below is too good to  pass up. Thanks to the reader who spotted it. This should not be taken as a lead for future items to be sent. I happen to have an emotional connection with Tom Waits. I sat in the two thirds full Canberra Theatre way back in 1979 and saw the greatest concert I've ever attended as Waits enthralled for two plus solo hours. He has never been back to the country, at least as a performer.

HOLLYWOOD – Ron Perlman has confirmed he will play Tom Waits in the long awaited David Lynch biopic of the singer/songwriter Raindog Trombone.

 

The Hellboy actor said that Waits has long been a hero of his and the opportunity to work with Lynch was ‘something every actor dreams of.’

The script – based on Barney Hoskins’ biography The Low Side of the Road – has been kicking around development hell for sometime, with various directors from Walter Salles to Martin Scorsese attached. Lynch came on-board only after the subject of the biopic made the request himself in a beautifully written letter which read:

Dear David,

My name’s Tom Waits. I kinda hope you heard of me, heh heh. Yeah, ahem, I know, I know. You must get letters of this kind all the time, but let me be clear, I ain’t gonna grouse or grovel, gravel and chickens and an ol’ 45 as a plate outside the window fills with rain. They’re tryin’ to get a movie made, of crows breaking black against a low November sky. And I’d sure appreciate it, that is, if’n you’d put your hand to the helm and try and get this rickety ol’ ship of a project off of the blunt rocks before the scarecrows attack with their penknives and tattoos of weeping clowns. I’ll pay you five gallons of petrol and a valentine nailed to the forehead of the last lawyer you loved.

Yours in a nightmare’s gown,

T. Waits

David Lynch’s reply read:

Dear Tom,
Cut the bullshit and tell me how much I’m going to get paid.
Best Wishes
David 

Raindog Trombones is due to start filming at three o’clock tomorrow morning.