Jerome Taylor reports that there are three biopics about Salvador Dali in the works, a perfect storm of competing productions that might make for a much bigger payoff for whoever is the first to get a completed film to market. (Who can forget the great multiple-Truman-Capote-movies dust-up of a few years ago?) The first film to arrive in theaters will probably be Paul Morrison's Little Ashes, which stars Robert Pattison, the vampire hunk from Twilght, as the young Dali, Javier Beltrán as Federico Garcia Lorca, and Matthew McNulty as Luis Bunuel, whose first film, the immortal Surrealist short Un Chien Andalou, was co-directed with Dali and featured a cameo by the artist as a priest. Another film, simply titled Dali, is being planned, by the director Simon West, for a 2010 release and would star Antonio Banderas as the older Dali, alongside his Zorro co-star Catherine Zeta Jones as Dali's wife, Gala. Then there's the chance that we'll get to see the way older Dali played by Al Pacino in a movie based on Dali & I: The Surreal Story, a book by Stan Lauryssens. Lauryssens's book, which has been translated into some thirty languages, had its own scandalous reception when it appeared. Lauryssens, who has written award-winning crime novels, five nonfiction books about the Nazis, and boasted about his expertise at writing and selling "fake interviews" with various Hollywood celebrities, also spent some time in the poky for selling fake Dalis. The book set off fire alarms in Europe for its allegation that Dali himself had effectively authorized the sale of forgeries of his work by setting up an assembly line of "assistants" to create works that he could then decorate with his signature, which amounted to printing money. By the time Dali was in his dotage, Andy Warhol was unapologetically doing pretty much the same thing, with Jeff Koons waiting in the wings; in Warhol's case, his admirers were happy to take the whole thing as some kind of postmodernist gesture and a sardonic comment on the treatment of works of art as high-priced commodities, but even if it was a gesture, Andy still expected people to pay through the nose for the damn things. If Lauryssens's depiction of Dali's operation is accurate, Dali might have been able to talk a pretty good game explaining that he was in charge of a "surreal" parody of the art world as just another industry. Of course, by that time, Dali had long since been read out of the Surrealist movement by his former brothers, who, appalled at what they saw as his selling out and turning himself into a profitable living cartoon of a wacky artist, referred to him by the anagrammatic nickname "Avida Dollars."



Dali himself had one foot in Hollywood for much of his life, engaging in publicity stunts such as presenting Harpo Marx with a "surreal" harp strung with barbed wire and cutlery, and designing the dream sequence for Hitchcock's analytic mystery Spelllbound. (That ended up being pretty much a publicity stunt, too; Hitchcock shot some twenty minutes of film based on the material Dali gave him, but the movie's producer, David Selznick, thought that it just slowed the picture down and cut it back to a few fragments.) He also spent eight months in 1945 working on an animated short for Walt Disney; it never got beyond am 18-minute test reel in Dali's and Disney's lifetimes, but the 2003 Destino was based on Dali's and Disney artist John Hench's storyboards. Back in his Hollywood-fake-journalist days, Laurysssens embroidered on that factoid and "made up a great story about how he and Disney were working on a sort of pornographic cartoon together.” Taylor writes that "That story caught the attention of a shady investment group in Belgium who assumed Lauryssens was a Dali expert and hired him as a fine art dealer. So, at just 25, Lauryssens found himself flying around Europe buying scores of Dali paintings despite having absolutely no prior experience in the world of fine art." According to Lauryssens, “everyone knew that Dali needed close to half a million dollars a month to fund his lavish lifestyle,” which Lauryssens likens to that of "a mini-maharajah,” and fake Dalis sold better by then than Dali's own later works because his "assistants" had a better handle on how to festoon the works with such familiar Dali "trademarks" as "the melting clocks." Of course, any Hollywood interest in Dali now will be based not on any debates over the degree to which he was an artist or a con man but on how sensational his life was, and here, Lauryssens, who is set to be played in the movie by Cillian Murphy, is confident that a film based on his book would qualify as a humdinger. Taylor notes that the book "portrayed the painter and his wife Gala as two voraciously charged lovers who regularly indulged in orgies with famous actresses". But by the last time Lauryssens laid eyes on him, Dali "was balding, his stomach swollen 'and his right arm shook from shoulder to wrist'." Lauryssens says that the movie is all set to go as soon as Pacino signs on. The trick there may be postponing Al's realization that he would be playing the fat old bald guy with the tremor who gets to spend his time on screen flashing back to when Cillian Murphy was involved in all those cool orgies.