Apparently so, according to Deadline:Considering that Buckley had only released a single album when he died in 1997 after getting caught in the wake of a passing boat in Tennessee’s Wolf River, it seems amazing that there are not one but three feature films about him. The first one to start production will be Greetings From Tim Buckley, the Dan Algrant-directed indie film that starts a four-week shoot Monday in Brooklyn. Conventional wisdom that the first film out of the gate wins doesn’t necessarily apply here; these two projects tell very different stories about Buckley. Scott is making a biopic, while Greetings From Tim Buckley stars Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley as a pre-fame Jeff Buckley who reconnects with his estranged father Tim by singing at a tribute concert for his folk-singer dad. In Algrant’s film, that short adventure forged Jeff Buckley’s own solo aspirations. The other Buckley film is called A Pure Drop and it is being mounted by Mad Bastards director Brendan Fletcher. The title comes from the book A Pure Drop: The Life of Jeff Buckley.
Carney will star in what Scott hopes will be a definitive film about Jeff Buckley’s life, and WME is raising funding. They have exclusive rights to Buckley’s music and personal archives, including the nod from Sony to use Leonard Cohen’sHallelujah, which is perhaps Buckley’s best-known tune from his first albumGrace. A second album, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, was released after Buckley died. Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, has also thrown in with Scott’s project and is executive producer. The script by Ryan Jaffe (The Rocker) was informed by the David Browne book Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley.
