Jerry Garcia Movie Gets a Director and Writer

Jerry Garcia’s pre-Grateful Dead life is about to be a movie.

After what’s been a long, strange trip, a planned Jerry Garcia movie now has a director and writer attached to the project. But the two guys pegged to fill the roles may not have quite the pedigree you’d expect for the long-anticipated movie about the late Grateful Dead frontman.

The director, Amir Bar-Lev, comes from a documentary film background. He most recently made “The Tillman Story”, a biopic about Pat Tillman who was killed in Afghanistan after leaving the NFL to join the army. The writer of the Jerry Garcia movie, Topper Lilien, is an even more unusual choice. His most recent credit is from the critically panned 2000 movie “Dungeons and Dragons.”

“Darkstar”, the working title of the Garcia movie, is about his life before joining the Grateful Dead. It’s based on the book “Darkstar: An Oral Biography on Jerry Garcia”, written by Rolling Stone mag contributor and author Robert Greenfield.

According to reports, the movie will end with the moment Garcia joins his famous band, and will show his life trials and tribulations as a young man, from getting married, to playing bluegrass in tiny coffee shops.

Darkstar is scheduled to begin production some time in 2011, so it’ll be awhile before it shows up in theaters. But his fans have waited this long, so what’s another year or two?