Where’s that movie? Four years ago, Madonna announced plans to direct a biopic about her rise to megastardom and revealed she had already started on the screenplay with Juno scriptwriter Diablo Cody.
But since then, the world’s most iconic female singer whose name isn’t Taylor Swift, has had other things to think about. She undertook an 80-date Celebration Tour and suffered a significant health scare when a bacterial infection required her to be put in a medically induced coma for 48 hours. She has also successfully fended off lawsuits from concert-goers over a late start to a show in New York and for alleged “pornographic” content in her Celebration set, including “topless women on stage simulating sex acts”.
That’s a lot for anyone—even a force of nature such as Madonna. But now that she finally has some free time, she has returned to her passion project and shared an image of herself working on the script. Meanwhile, Hollywood sources have confirmed Ozark’s Julia Garner is still on track to play the icon, having originally been announced for the part in June 2022.
We even have a title, Who’s That Girl – an inspired if slightly confusing pick, given that Madonna appeared in a movie called Who’s That Girl? in 1987. It’s as if George Lucas had decided to make a new sci-fi epic and called it Star Warz.
Is it mad to believe Madge could still bring her big swing to fruition? The road to her latest Instagram message has been long and strewn with controversy. That said, Madonna is an expert at getting exactly what she wants – whether that be kissing Britney Spears at an awards ceremony, twerking with Ali G in a video or, as she did with 2011’s critically panned W.E., directing a time-travelling rom-com featuring Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.
Rumors of a Madonna biopic first surfaced in 2017. The chatter surprised many people, not least Madonna. She was quick to express her displeasure when Universal announced it was moving forward with Blonde Ambition, with a script by Elyse Hollander – which topped the famous Black List of red-hot screenplays doing the rounds in Hollywood – to be overseen by Rush Hour director Brett Ratner.
Who’s That Girl—an inspired if slightly confusing pick, given that Madonna appeared in a movie called Who’s That Girl? in 1987.
Madonna didn’t hold back. “Why would Universal Studios want to make a movie about me based on a script that is all lies???” she wrote in a post she later deleted. “The writer Elyse Hollander should write for the tabloids.”
The singer proceeded to rip to shreds the script – with which she was obviously familiar – scene by scene. She singled out a sequence in which she is shown telling American Bandstand host Dick Clark that she was born in Detroit and “dropped out of high school”.
“I was born in Bay City, not Detroit,” she wrote. “And I did not drop out of high school. In fact, I went to the University of Michigan.”
Universal, Hollander and Ratner, who had directed Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger” video, could consider themselves well and truly fact-checked – though Madonna deleted the post when it emerged she had told Clark she was “born in Detroit” and was a “famed high-school dropout”. For good measure, Madonna sent them a string of snake emojis. (Later that year, Ratner would be accused of serious sexual misconduct by numerous women; he vehemently denied the claims and has not directed a film since.)
Blonde Ambition was not especially flattering towards Madonna. It implied she lifted her early image from a woman she encountered in the New York club scene named “Bianca Stonewell” (an amalgam of several real-life musicians – including, it is speculated, members of UK female punk group, The Slits). There is also a sequence in which Madonna tells her then-boyfriend and producer, Jellybean Benitez, that she had an abortion so as not to have to choose between “family and career”. There were claims, too, that the screenplay invented an early friendship between a then-unknown Madonna and Cher.
Whatever the truth, Madonna’s displeasure was enough to cancel Blonde Ambition. Yet for Madonna, a flame had been lit. In August 2020, she appeared on Instagram Live, hosting a script-writing session with Cody. The following month, Madonna confirmed they were collaborating on her biopic, along with power-house producer Amy Pascal (“I can’t imagine anything more thrilling than collaborating with her and Diablo on bringing her true-life story to the big screen,” said Pascal).
It’s easy to see why Pascal was drawn to the project. In the wake of the Oscar-winning Queen hagiography Bohemian Rhapsody, rock biopics were the hot new thing in Hollywood. And if anyone had a story wilder and more over-the-top than Freddie Mercury’s, it was Madonna.
She was thinking big. The movie, she said, would trace her “struggle as an artist trying to survive in a man’s world as a woman, and really just the journey” – which she described as a “happy, sad, mad, crazy, good, bad, and ugly” account of her rise to mega-fame. We would follow her early days in New York, writing “Like a Prayer,” starring in Alan Parker’s 1996 adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita and her friendship with Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza and Luis Xtravaganza, members of the underground New York ballroom scene that inspired “Vogue.”
If anyone had a story wilder and more over-the-top than Freddie Mercury’s, it was Madonna.
Twelve months later, however, Cody was reported to have quit. The Sun claimed she and Madonna had clashed over their visions for the film. “Madonna and Diablo spent weeks working on the screenplay and made good progress,” the newspaper reported.
“But Madonna is understandably very particular about how she wants it to be. She’s a perfectionist, and because it is about her life, she is very careful about how things come across. Diablo needed more freedom to make it work and ultimately decided she couldn’t contribute anymore.”
Those reports were subsequently poo-pooed in The Hollywood Reporter, where sources said Cody had simply finished her draft and moved on to her next gig.
Next came the casting process: who had the cojones to play the young Miss Ciccone? Madonna was determined to put the potential mini-Madges through their paces. Half a dozen singers and actresses – including Florence Pugh and pop star Sky Ferreira – were assembled for what one publication labelled as the film-making equivalent of Full Metal Jacket.
Madonna wasn’t mucking about. The hopefuls were made to participate in 11-hour dance rehearsals with the star’s personal choreographer, to have script readings with Madonna and to then sing Madonna songs to Madonna (while Who’s That Girl isn’t a musical in the conventional sense, we will see young Madonna performing some of her greatest hits). In the end, the winner – or perhaps the only actress left standing – was Garner.
Nobody involved could have been surprised at all the hoops they were asked to jump through. Madonna has long had a reputation as an uncompromising collaborator. For example, her 2011 film W.E. – inspired by her fascination with Edward Windsor and Wallis Simpson and distributed by Harvey Weinstein’s company – was beset by rumors of tensions behind the scenes.
Ewan McGregor and Vera Farmiga – her first choice as Edward and Wallis – both turned down the roles. Producer David Parfitt and casting director Nina Gold also quit early in the process following reports Madonna struggled “to collaborate and delegate”. “All directors are demanding - there’s nothing new there – but there’s an art to doing it with grace and good manners,” said a source at the time.
They were followed by actor Margo Stilley, who walked out after landing a part. “I had the role, but we had artistic differences. She (Madonna) is really something. I wish the cast luck because they are all really talented.”
Talented but also willing to put up with Madonna’s perfectionism. For instance, she required James D’Arcy (the new Edward VIII following McGregor’s exit) to learn to ride horses. He was also given six weeks to master the bagpipes.
In the event, W.E. needed a lot more than Stilley’s good wishes or D’Arcy’s bagpipes mastery. Madonna’s attempt to recast the romance between Edward and Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) as one of the great love affairs of the 20th century was savaged by critics – “risible dialogue and weak performances” – as was her bid to portray Edward’s well-documented Nazi sympathies. “Most of it is based on rumors,” says Abbie Cornish’s Wally Winthrop (who becomes obsessed with Simpson in the present day) to her doctor husband. “I thought doctors were into empirical evidence.”
That film’s commercial and artistic failure does not appear to have put her off. With her Celebration tour now finished, she’s back at the word processor and apparently raring to go. The pipe dream of an all-singing, all-dancing, all-vogue-ing Madonna movie is, for better or potentially worse, a step closer to reality.
Ed Power writes about music, video games, and other pop-culture ephemera
