Retro IONCINEMA.com
Genuine Fake: ‘Dali and I’ Heading to Film
Sometimes a genuine life really does imitate art. But then again, who’s to say that the art is genuine either? Academy Award nominee Andrew Niccol has been tapped by Room 9 Entertainment to adapt and direct Stan Lauryssens‘ eclectic biography of Salvador Dali entitled Dali & I: The Surreal Story. Niccol is developing the script, originally penned by John Salvati, into his trademark style. In Niccol’s previous scripts the individual loses their grip on reality and becomes the victim of their own demons and fantasies. In the case of Salvador Dali, Niccol’s need only capture the true life onto film stock.
Quick Links > Official site: Stan Lauryssens > S1M0NE > Gattaca |
Sometimes a genuine life really does imitate art. But then again, who’s to say that the art is genuine either? Academy Award nominee Andrew Niccol has been tapped by Room 9 Entertainment to adapt and direct Stan Lauryssens‘ eclectic biography of Salvador Dali entitled Dali & I: The Surreal Story. Niccol is developing the script, originally penned by John Salvati, into his trademark style. In Niccol’s previous scripts the individual loses their grip on reality and becomes the victim of their own demons and fantasies. In the case of Salvador Dali, Niccol’s need only capture the true life onto film stock.
Room 9 Entertainment is eyeing the project as a follow-up to its successful political satire Thank You for Smoking. Room 9’s David Sacks, Daniel Brunt and Michael Newman are teaming up to produce the project that is slated for a spring 2007 shoot. Niccol’s previous successes include the acclaimed Nick Cage Lord of War, Gattaca and a 1999 Academy nod for the Jim Carrey pic The Truman Show screenplay.
In the literary version of Dali and I, Stan Lauryssens tells the story of his relationship with the famed artist from humble beginnings as a corrupt art dealer passing fake Dali’s as cash investments, up to his position as “one of the family” in the last days of the painter’s life. The screen adaptation is set to cover the period from the 1960s-1980s, when most of Dali’s greatest work was behind him and the eccentric artist delved further and further into his own surrealist universe. It was during this period that the greatest amount of “genuine fake” Salvador Dali paintings were created and passed into the market, some ending up in such famous venues as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
The pic won’t be just another “artist biopic”, according to Sacks, “We want this to tackle questions like ‘What is modern art? Does it have value? Is it worth the millions of dollars that people are paying for it?’” A more apparent question of the moment would seem to be, is modern art still popular enough to warrant millions of dollars a full production is going to cost, or will this end up being a big budget art house flick?
Niccol and his backers will have their work cut out for them in attempting to capture the flamboyant guru of modern surrealism. By the end of the 1940s Dali had realized most of his artistic vision, and with the help of his wife and muse Gala, a Russian immigrant 11 years his senior, began to immerse himself in his own version of reality that included a sex circus with such future famers as Mia Farrow, Ali McGraw, and Amanda Lear and a mountainside home with a room shaped perfectly like an egg.
It was in this period that Dali’s infamous “Genuine Fakes” began. Isidro Bea, Dali’s assistant starting in 1955, developed a technique in which he used a projector to enlarge original Dali and other works onto a canvas, at which point he simply traced and painted them. Bea, a former theatrical stage designer, says in Lauryssens’ book, “I knew all the tricks”. In referring to the giant canvas paintings made post 1955, Bea claims credit for all of them. “They are all theatre backdrops, basically”, he says. Dali would sign each counterfeit canvas, and his manager would issue a certificate of authenticity, which made even the fakes genuine. Hence the term “genuine fake”. Dali had become so obsessed with money by that time, that he was known to crawl around his lawyer’s office signing blank pieces of paper, which would later be sold for $40 each. Eventually he had so much cash on hand that entire storage rooms were stacked floor to ceiling with shoeboxes of cold hard currency. Dali was reported to have been able to sign enough papers to make $72,000 in an hour.
Sotheby’s and Christie’s both refuse to offer any Dali works at all due to the vast number of both genuine fakes and fake fakes (any Dali painting created after 1972, when the artist’s Parkinson’s disease left his motor skills useless). Thus we are left with the question that Room 9 hopes to answer with a resounding and profitable “yes”, is the mainstream world ready for the tale of extravagances, voyeurism, greed and lust?
