Michael Hutchence Gets His Own Depressing INXS Biopic

If you want to win an Oscar these days, all you need to do is strap on some spangly shades and pretend to be a dead singer. How much that's got to do with the announcement of a Michael Hutchence INXS biopic remains to be seen.

Slide Away, the long-rumoured biopic of Michael Hutchence - the singer with rubbish 1980s Australian band INXS who died by hanging himself with a belt from a hotel door while he was having a wank - is finally looking as if it'll start rolling into production sometime soon. How many people will actually want to go and see Slide Away is another matter, though - after all, everyone knows how it ends.

The announcement of a Michael Hutchence biopic is hardly surprising - literally everyone who has ever even looked at a microphone in their lives are getting the biopic treatment. Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan and Missy Elliott are all having their lives scrubbed up into jumped-up TV movies that will inexplicably get nominated for an Oscar, so why not Michael Hutchence too? After all, his life was pretty perfectly mapped out for a movie: sing a shit song, shag Kylie, sing a shit song, shag Paula Yates, die in a hotel with a belt around your neck and your knob in your hand. What more could you ask for?

Slide Away, for that's the title of the Michael Hutchence biopic, has been floating around for a while - so much so that Johnny Depp has already decided he doesn't want anything to do with it - but now it looks like it's definitely going to happen, since producer Clark Westerman has recruited music video director Nick Egan to take charge of things. Westerman says:

“I said, ’Somebody else is going to do it, and they are not going to do it as well as you would because you knew him so well.' [The wank death] is not the memory of what we are after, and that’s not the story of who the man is. What we are aiming for is the journey through a person’s life via their head.”

According to reports, Slide Away has had a troubled conception since the production involved gaining the cooperation of the family and trust of Michael Hutchence, and presumably finding funding for a vanity project about a singer in a terrible band who people mainly know about because he died while he was wanking was tricky too. Apparently Clark Westerman and Nick Egan are now sifting through the INXS catalogue for the soundtrack. Hopefully they're not looking for a half-decent tune, because they'll have a long wait.

Read more:

INXS' Hutchence Due For Film Treatment - MSNBC

[story by Stuart Heritage]