Madonna has no regrets, but please no ‘Blond Ambition’ biopic
“EVERYONE who achieves public recognition is always at odds with it. One minute you are so grateful that you have an audience and that people are paying attention. Then the next minute you are feeling overanalyzed and intruded upon — life in the fifish bowl.
“But honestly, that part — being observed constantly — I’ve come to terms with. I ask the rhetorical question now; ‘is it worth it?’ It’s not just me. Ask anybody in any line of work, in any station of life — is it worth it, their individual struggle?”
That’s what Madonna told me not quite back in the day, but back in another day, for an interview with Out magazine. Much has happened since then, but The Big M’s essential attitudes toward fame and its inevitable intrusions haven’t changed much, I don’t think.
Still, it must have come as a rather bizarre belated April Fools’ joke when last week news broke that a feature fifilm biopic of the pop icon, unimaginatively titled Blond Ambition,” is in the works. Madonna saw the Elyse Hollander script and flflipped. “Lies have no legs,” she semicryptically remarked. (Actually, lies can have legs, but I think M intends to shatter a femur or two before she’s done.)
What makes the intended fifilm so foolish is that it purports to chronicle Madonna’s life only up until 1984, the night of the infamous MTV Awards. There she sang (and writhed) her “Like a Virgin” song. But that’s exactly the territory covered in a terrible (but wonderful-terrible) 1994 TV movie called “Madonna: Innocence Lost.” The title alone was enough to ensure its tacky immortality. That one ended with Madonna, all alone in her dressing room, either just before or just after performing at the MTV event, rather gloomily pondering her fate, her intention to “conquer the world,” as she had impudently told Dick Clark she surely would.
The fallacy of that scene was Madonna alone or at all depressed. Even if she had been unsure of how her flfloor- rolling, thighexposing rendition of the song had gone over, she was most assuredly surrounded by people saying those immortal four words, “Darling, you were fabulous!” What new ground does Blond Ambition” hope to plow? And why? She’ll never allow her early hits to be used — what is a Madonna movie without those classics? And her greatest fame and impact was yet to come. Since Madonna’s private life has seemingly been an open book (emphasis on seemingly) what is there to tell, that won’t get the producers sued?
At only 58, now the mother of six children (she adopted twin girls from Malawi early this year) and with something always cooking professionally, “looking back” on Madonna doesn’t seem to be a concept anybody’s ready for, certainly not the lady herself. She is resistant to nostalgia, and — like most human beings — resistant to “alternative facts.” We all want to steer our own schooner, or — as in Madonna’s case — a heavily weaponized luxury cruiser.
My take? Don’t dress, as the old expression goes, for “Blonde Ambition.” Maybe the producer, Brett Ratner, was just sitting around and decided, “Slow day. Let’s make Madonna crazy for no good reason.”
THIS ‘N’ THAT:
In Rolling Stone magazine’s “The 50 Greatest Concerts of All Time” take-out, I loved Mick Jagger’s recollection that Truman Capote was hired by RS to do a cover story on the Stones 1972 tour. Capote was not thrilled with the assignment, “for him it was a social occasion.” Tru was also mortally offffended that Jagger wore the same outfifit every night. “He would like it better now. I have a much bigger wardrobe!” Mick says. label like it’s happens that