With the news that a film script based on the life of Brian Wilson has been commissioned, plus Wilson's recent announcement that his forthcoming UK dates will be a last, maybe it's as good-a-time as any to look behind the reasons for the latest activity in the Beach Boys camp.
It's the imminent 50th anniversary of the formation of the Beach of Boys that is bringing Wilson and his former band mates back into the public eye. The Wilson biopic is one of many projects in the pipeline; including a deluxe release of the oft bootlegged, but never officially released, 1966/67 SMiLE sessions, and a possible regrouping of the band's surviving members for a tour.
The Beach Boys On Film
There have already been a couple of attempts at capturing the Beach Boys story on film. Back at the turn of the new millennium a four-hour TV movie, The Beach Boys: An American Family, proved watchable but far from informative. It had already been superseded by Summer Dreams: The Story of The Beach Boys, which was neither watchable nor informative.
So it is was with much anticipation and enthusiasm that Wilson fans devoured the news that it is to be Oren Moverman, the co-writer of the 2007 Bob Dylan movie I'm Not There, who has been hired to write the script.
It has been stated by producer Bill Pohlad in the Los Angeles Times that: "What's fascinating to me is to look at the different elements in his life, like that super-creative period when he was doing Pet Sounds and the later part when he was redeemed."
SMiLE: Pet Sounds Follow-Up Set For Release
The forthcoming release of the album SMiLE, sees the once lost and incomplete sessions hit the shelves some forty-five years after their originally planned follow-up to the band's 1966 classic, Pet Sounds.
The material was left abandoned owing to Wilson's much publicised mental breakdown and subsequent fragile state of mind. He made an attempt at closure when, in September 2004, he finished SMiLE and released with the aid of his touring band. but it's the original all Beach Boys fans have wanted to gain an official release.
Which brings us to the reformation of the surviving members of the Beach Boys. Wilson was reported as saying recently that: "I'm considering it. I don't know yet, but I am considering it. Nothing's really holding me back. I just don't know if I want to be around those guys, you know? They're zany guys. They're crazy."
When Rolling Stone spoke to Al Jardine in the summer of 2010, he said that at least one reunion show with surviving members Mike Love, Brian Johnston, Brian Wilson and himself was in the cards. And even Brian Wilson surely couldn't say 'no' to one more run through the hits. Not with SMiLE in the can and the major biopic under construction!
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