Last night the Internet came alive with the announcement that Gossip Girl and Easy A star Penn Badgley would play late alt-rock crooner Jeff Buckley in a biopic, but the real news may be this: There are now two Jeff Buckley biopics in the works. The first is the one that Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, had recently begun moving forward on with Welcome To The Rileys director Jake Scott, progress that notably included signing over the rights to use her son’s music. The other one has that guy from Gossip Girl. And although Guibert has been trying to tell her son’s life story for many years, it seems as though the Gossip Girl guy will get there first, as he’s set to begin shooting Greetings From Tim Buckley as early as this August.
The film from writer-director Dan Algrant will focus on the few days leading up to the younger Buckley’s star-making 1991 performance at a tribute to his estranged father, who was a folk icon in his own right, and as this movie takes place before Jeff Buckley’s career really gets started, they don’t even need the rights to his songs. So there, we guess. What this means for the other, more comprehensive Jeff Buckley biopic remains to be seen, but with Badgley already out of the way we suppose this means Robert Pattinson still has a shot.