A Life In The Day: Come Together

EXCLUSIVE: Nicholas Hoult and Jack O’Connell are circling A Life In The Day, the Tony Gittelson script about the life of Brian Epstein, who discovered and managed the Beatles from 1961-1967, before he died of a drug overdose at 32. Justin Chadwick (Tulip Fever) is in talks to direct the project, which David Permut will produce through his Permut Presentations banner along with Dylan Sellers’ Rivers Edge Films...

This is still a fluid situation with no deals set, but if it all comes together, Hoult would play the flamboyant and gay Epstein, with O’Connell the brilliant but troubled John Lennon. The intense relationship between the two men has been the subject of much debate and analysis over the years. As recently as this week, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono mused about the possibility that Epstein and Lennon had sex with each other. She was quoted in the Daily Beast as saying, “It was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship.” ...

Deadline.

Hope this happens (and we get to see Nic in the nip again).

Cilla Black: 1943-2015

Any friend of Brian Epstein is a friend of mine (even though you're a Tory).

PS Cilla also made The Smiths split up, some claim to fame.*

* The straw finale that made Johnny Marr quit The Smiths was Morrissey getting them to cover Cilla's Love Work Is A Four Letter Word.

Simon Napier-Bell: The Ultimate Rock & Roll Fantasist

“Well, Brian Epstein had fallen in love with me and got in a flutter and took a lot of sleeping pills – I wasn’t having an affair with him but his last message was to me. And the Mail did a thing on it and they printed a picture of me and Epstein and said I wasn’t homosexual. And I thought it made me look dishonest, as if I’d been lying all my life.”

Hard to find a line in this interview in The Times that sounds true.

As if you'd been lying all your life!

Good old Simon.

He's such a card!

PS Simon's memoir of the British music biz in the 60s, You Don't Have To Say You Love Me, is an absolute hoot - but should be filed under 'Fiction'.

Mr Napier-Bell has a new (crowdfunded) book out, Ta-Ra-Ra Boom De-Ay: The Dodgy Business of Popular Music.

Brian Epstein: The Life Of Brian

"Brian was a gay man living in a country where gay sex was still a felony. The year he died, 1967, was supposed to be the Summer of Love. But that was only if you happened to be into the right variety of love.

"Naturally I hope our book will be a treat for fans of The Beatles. But what inspired me even more was the human struggle Brian Epstein faced.

"His homosexuality and his attitude to it wasn't the whole story, but it was a big part of it."

Vivek Tiwary, author of a new graphic novel, The Fifth Beatle, in BBC News magazine.

He could have pointed out here the cruel irony that 1967 was also the year that homosexuality was decriminalised in England. 

Check out the all-singing, all-swinging website - they say the book is soon to be a major motion picture.

But there are always rumours that someone's making a major motion picture about Brian.
Last month it was "confirmed" Benedict Cumberbatch will star in a biopic.

Wish someone would.

The 50s: The Good Old Days!

In an in-no-way incongruous book serialisation the Daily Mail publishes an extract about gay life in Britain in the late 50s, taken from the brilliant liberal social historian David Kynaston's Modernity Britain: Opening The Box 1957-1959.
And what fun times they sound!
Brian Epstein gets arrested for "importuning", Conservative junior cabinet minister Ian Harvey gets caught with a guardsman in St James's Park - and resigns "disgraced", Liberace gets "libelled" by the Daily Mirror, ordinary gay men gas themselves, parliament ignores the Wolfenden Report's recommendation to decriminalise homosexuality...
Have to consult the actual book and see if Kynaston writes anything about what the Daily Mail was saying about gay men back in the 50s.

• Image of 1952 Sunday Pictorial article, Evil Men [from LAGNA].

Joe Orton: Apropos Of Nothing

'After about five minutes or so a youngish man with a hairstyle which was way out in 1958, short, college-boy came up and said, "...I'm Brian Epstein's personal assistant."
'It crossed my mind to wonder why the English have never got around to finding a perfectly respectable word for "boyfriend".'

Joe Orton, diary entry January 24th 1967.
From the introduction to Up Against It.
Dunno exactly why but something made me think about this PA/boyfriend continuum quotation today.
Moral: Don't think the closet will save you - it'll only fuck you over in the end.