Less than a month after the announcement of a movie about the feuding Kinks Ray and Dave Davies, Virgin Produced has tabled a drama that will focus on Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ squally relationship during the making of the Rolling Stones’ classic 1972 double album “Exile on Main Street” in the South of France. A movie about the Beatles’ ruckuses during the recording of “Let It Be” and “Abbey Road” can’t be far behind.
Richard Branson, whose Virgin Records released three studio albums and three live albums by the Stones between 1994 and 2005, has acquired the rights to Robert Greenfield’s 2006 book “Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones.” The brothers Brandon and Phillip Murphy, who have day jobs as a graffiti artist and a standup comedian, respectively, have been assigned to adapt it. Their previous script, “The Last Drop,” about an alcoholic New Yorker writer who meets the girl of his dreams, was on the 2011 Hollywood Blacklist before being picked up for production.
In April 1971, tax exiles Jagger, Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Mick Taylor, accompanied by a sizeable retinue, decamped to Richards’s leased mansion, Villa Nellcôte, at Villefrance-sur-mer on the Côte d’Azur. Built in the 1850s, the 16-room house had been a Gestapo headquarters during World War II; the heating vents in the damp basement, where the Stones hammered out the likes of “Tumbling Dice” and “Sweet Black Angel,” were reportedly decorated with gold swastikas.
Amid legendary chaos, the songs, forged from demos and incomplete tracks, were recorded by producer Jimmy Miller and engineer Andy Johns in a new £65,000 mobile studio parked outside. The session musicians included Billy Preston, Nicky Hopkins, Jim Price, Ian Stewart, and Bobby Keys. Wyman contributed less than usual. As well as groupies and drug dealers, the guests included William S. Burroughs and a troublemaking Gram Parsons, one of Richards’ best friends. Richard and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg were heroin addicts at the time. Jagger married Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias in Saint-Tropez that May.
The sessions ended in October, whereupon Jagger assumed responsibility for finishing the record in Los Angeles. While it is often considered Richards’s masterpiece, Jagger has said he is less proud of it than other Stones records. "This new album is fucking mad,” he said at the time of its release. “There's so many different tracks. It's very rock and roll, you know. I didn't want it to be like that. I'm the more experimental person in the group, you see I like to experiment. Not go over the same thing over and over ... I mean, I'm very bored with rock and roll. The revival. Everyone knows what their roots are, but you've got to explore everywhere. You've got to explore the sky, too."
There’s no word yet who play the Glimmer Twins, their bandmates, consorts, Parsons, or Burroughs. It’s either the eventual casting director’s dream or his or her worst nightmare.