Actor Jonah Hill has been tapped to play late Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia in the forthcoming Martin Scorsese-directed biopic on the band for Apple.
The core four surviving band members — guitarist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh and percussionists Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart— will serve as executive producers on the as-yet-untitled project, along with the late guitar player’s daughter, Trixie Garcia, according to the movie industry journal Deadline, which broke the casting news Thursday, Nov. 18.
Hill and Scorsese will produce, and the script is being co-written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who were also behind “American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” and Rick Yorn.
With the band’s involvement, it is likely that Apple has secured the rights to the Dead’s music as well.
Scorsese is a longtime Deadhead, who produced and directed the 2017 Grateful Dead documentary “Long Strange Trip.” It will mark his first biopic-style film and arrives after the success of other blockbuster biopics such as “Rocket Man” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which fictionalized the career trajectories of Elton John and Queen, respectively.
Apple also got rave reviews for its Todd Haynes-directed documentary on the Velvet Underground, which was released last month.
Hill previously worked with Scorsese on “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which earned the actor a best supporting actor Oscar nomination.
The Grateful Dead’s history is one of the most storied in rock ‘n’ roll.
Coming together out of the remnants of various Palo Alto folk and bluegrass groups, the band started performing in spring 1965 as the Warlocks before changing its name that December.
They became the house band at Ken Kesey’s famous Acid Tests, providing the soundtrack for the dawn of the psychedelic era. In one of the most illustrious careers in rock music history, the Dead performed at such historic 1960s rock events as the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock.
The band was also at Altamont, the Rolling Stones’ free concert, where the Dead’s appearance was canceled after fans and security — members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang — clashed, and one audience member was killed.
The Dead joined the Allman Brothers and the Band for a show at Watkins Glen, N.Y., in 1973, before a crowd of more than 650,000 — the largest single audience recorded at a musical event.
In 1978, the Dead traveled to Egypt to perform at the base of the Great Pyramids.
Throngs of itinerant Deadheads followed the band from town to town, often causing problems in host cities. Only days before the band played its final show July 9, 1995 at Soldier Field, fans rioted outside an Indianapolis concert.
During its last 10 years on the road, the Dead grossed more than $200 million from 350 shows, according to Billboard Boxscore.
The band managed to endure the death of two keyboard players in its 30-year history — Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan and Brent Mydland — but with Garcia’s death in August 1995, the Dead faced a future without the most visible member of the group.
For years after his passing, the surviving band members were rarely on speaking terms.
Apart from a few sporadic appearances, including a partial reunion as the Other Ones in 1998 and a performance in support of Barack Obama’s presidential bid in 2008 at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, the famously feuding surviving members all but dissolved their business operations as the Grateful Dead to avoid dealing with one another.
But in 2015, the band reunited for a run of 50th anniversary concerts at Chicago’s Soldier Field and Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.
A spinoff band called Dead and Company — made up of Hart, Kreutzmann and Weir with John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti — has performed regularly ever since.
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