McQueen back on the screen in biopic,Hollywood

march.26.09

Cult figures are all the rage among filmmakers this week. The beat generation, and specifically the 1944 murder that helped spawn it, will be the subject of the independent film Kill Your Darlings, The Hollywood Reporter writes. Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland) will play the poet Allen Ginsberg, while Chris Evans has been cast as Jack Kerouac. Ben Whishaw will play a supporting role in the film, which is to be produced by Christine Vachon’s aptly named Killer Films.

Meanwhile, a new biopic of Steve McQueen is in the works. Jesse Wigutow is writing a screenplay based on Marshall Terrill’s biography Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel, for the producers Michael Cerenzie and Christine Peters, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

And the Weinstein Company has acquired US, Latin American, and German distribution rights to Nowhere Boy, a biopic focusing on another iconic cultural phenomenon, The Beatles’ John Lennon. Currently filming in Liverpool, Sam Taylor-Wood’s film focuses on Lennon’s adolescent years.