In what might just be a propitious turn of events, Martin Scorsese has dropped out of what was intended to be his next film--a documentary about Bob Marley that he was working on with Steve Bing's Shangri-La Entertainment and Fortissimo Films, the same team with whom he made the Rolling Stones concert movie Shine a Light--and Jonathan Demme has stepped in. The movie, which everyone wants finished for a release date of February 6, 2010--the late, Jamaican reggae legend's 65th birthday--would have been Scorsese's fourth music documentary of this decade, counting the Bob Dylan film No Direction Home and Scorsese's episode of the PBS series The Blues. (It also would have taken him out of his comfort zone of music and musicians associated with the 1960s, unlike another project that's still reportedly on his plate, a documentary about George Harrison.) Apparently Scorsese was forced to bow to scheduling reality. Besides the Harrison doc, he's also preparing The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt with Leonardo Di Caprio and an adaptation of the Shusako Endo novel Silence from a script by Jay Cocks, even as he's already begun shooting Shutter Island, also with DiCaprio, and based on a novel by Dennis Lehane.
Scorsese was working on the Marley movie with the blessing of the singer's family. When he signed on, Marley's son Ziggy Marley, who's serving as executive producer, was quoted as saying, "I am thrilled that the Marley family will finally have the opportunity to document our father's legacy and are truly honored to have Mr. Scorsese guide the journey." Now Ziggy's gone back to the well and said of Demme, "His empathy with my father's body of work and his unique understanding of the musical documentary form makes me confident that this film will be the ultimate celebration of my father's life." Even if it's intended as spin control--Marley would probably do his best to sound upbeat if he woke up tomorrow morning to find that Demme had been replaced by Uwe Boll--the sentiment computes. Not only has Demme made his own string of superior rock movies (Stop Making Sense, the more recent Neil Young picture Heart of Gold), but some of his other films, notably the documentaries Haiti--Dreams of Democracy and The Agronomist reveal a passionate feel for the Caribbean culture and the mixture of pop and politics that informed Marley's career. Warming up to his assignment, Demme has referred to Bob Marley as "one of the greatest human beings of modern times".