I've never heard the story of
Milli Vanilli before today but it sure sounds interesting. Apparently they were a band that rose to fame in the late 1980's selling millions of records around the world (especially in their home land of Germany) before it was revealed that they were frauds, and they didn't actually sing on their records. Fabrice Morvan and Rob Pilatus made up the band, but in their defense they were signed up after producer Frank Farian had recorded three different artists and they were trapped into being the "faces" of the someone elses music. When the band refused to promote a second album in the same way and demanded that their own voices were used, the producer let the cat out of the bag and lawsuits and public scandal erupted. An attempted comeback was set to happen in the late 90's but Pilatus sadly committed suicide from a drug overdose in 1998 at the age of 32.
Catch Me If You Can scribe
Jeff Nathanson will be writing and also making his directorial debut on the flick, which currently doesn't have a title. Nathanson spoke of the project to
Variety...
"I've always been fascinated by the notion of fakes and frauds, and in this case, you had guys who pulled off the ultimate con, selling 30 million singles and 11 million albums and then becoming the biggest laughing-stocks of pop entertainment......Fabrice had always refused to sell their rights; he was very cautious of Hollywood after all he'd been through. But my intention is to tell this story from their point of view." Catch Me If You Can was one of my favourite movies from 2002 and it sounds like from that last line of his interview they we may see Milli Vanilli portrayed in a sympathetic light similar to his biopic of Frank Abagnale Jr. Interesting movie to keep track of. It sounds like a killer story and depending on who they cast....it could be a potential Oscar vehicle perhaps? source -
variety