Honestly, it would be really funny to have a biopic about Neil Cicierga with Neil playing himself in a fictionalized autobiography where he gets to make up a bunch of surreal bullshit about his life. Like a feature-length edition of Guaranteed* Videos
The story of a true outsider: Steve Jeltz. One of the only MLB players to be born in Paris. He was the worst baseball player in 1988 in the MLB with a .210 batting average but he was a reliable infielder.
June 8th 1989. His team, the Phillies, started a game against the Pirates with a rookie Barry Bonds helping lead the Pirates to an astounding 10 run first inning. The Phillies basically gave up trying and Jeltz took the opportunity to try new stuff. He hit 2 home runs that day. One as a lefty and the other as a righty - one of the only players to hit a home run from each side of home plate in a game. It was a first for the Phillies. Even more amazing is that before today the last homerun Jeltz hit was 7 years ago. He never hit home runs and today he hit 2 wild ones.
His team saw him smashing dingers and thought “if the worst player in the league can do this, maybe I should fuck around”. The Phillies rallied and went on to upset the 10 - 0 lead by winning 15 to 11. Because Steve Jeltz inspired a bunch of fuck ups to fuck around and, against all odds, it worked.
As a Canadian, I’ve been hoping for a Stan Roger’s biopic but I know that’s pretty niche. He was a folk singer who started making some waves when he died in a cabin fire on an Air Canada flight coming back from Texas to Canada in 1983 when he was only 33. His songs became part of the Canadian music tradition, as he generally wrote songs based on Canadian topics and issues. Most recently there were some fun clips of Stephen Colbert asking some guests if they knew any of his songs, like Michael Buble (who as a Canadian did indeed) and Jack White (who somewhat surprisingly also did, but is less surprising when you know that two of his grandparents were born and raised in Nova Scotia). Stan’s brother Garnett Rogers wrote a phone book-sized memoir of their time on the road touring that has plenty of material to pull from, and I always figured it would make a great music biopic, at least for Canadians. Our own Walk the Line or Ray.
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