Breaking Baz: Dave Stewart Sets Shekhar Kapur To Direct ‘Ebony McQueen’; Eurythmics Rocker Will Collaborate With A.R. Rahman On Coming-Of-Age Pic’s Songs & Score
EXCLUSIVE: Dave Stewart, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee with Eurythmics partner Annie Lennox, reveals to Deadline that Elizabeth, What’s Love Got to Do With It? director Shekhar Kapur will shoot feature film musical Ebony McQueen, a 1960s-early ’70s coming-of-age story inspired by the rock legend’s teen years in the North East of England and the discs and soundtracks that sparked his journey to becoming a musician.
The film will feature songs ( music and lyrics) by Stewart and garlanded South Asian composer A.R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire, Elizabeth: The Golden Age) is partnering with Stewart to compose the Ebony McQueen’s musical score.
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The production will be located in Stewart’s hometown in the once-mighty shipbuilding city of Sunderland, with plans for filming to start in the spring. The actual streets where Stewart grew up have been redeveloped, though there are areas nearby with buildings that match the era the film’s set in.
The region soon will boast one of the largest film studios in Europe. The regeneration enterprise plans for Crown Works Studio, which will have 19 soundstages and other facilities, were approved this year, but work is unlikely to be completed in time for Ebony McQueen to make use of them.
Ebony McQueen is based on Stewart’s acclaimed eponymous 2022 autobiographical triple album and a script he wrote with Lorne Campbell & Selma Dimitrijevi?, and Peter Souter.
As a teen, Stewart lived to play soccer, but his pro footballing dream ended when a crunching tackle during a game left him with a busted knee. “When I was at my lowest point, a turn of fate changed my life forever. Music appeared as if by magic,” Stewart says. “Yes, music found me and opened my eyes to a whole new world.”
Billy Elliot, another movie about the transformative power of art, also was set in the northeast of England.
A few years ago, Stewart started to write some songs around his teenage years and then decided to collaborate with Campbell (The Last Ship), a former artistic director of the National Theatre of Wales and Northern Stage in Newcastle, “and sparks began to fly.” Creative sparks also “flew” when the music artist met with producer David Parfitt (Shakespeare in Love, The Father) — who also is a native of Sunderland — “and a dream team was beginning to form,” he says.
Parfitt notes that he’s excited to be embarking on “this adventure with such a stellar team” and adds that he’s “excited to be shooting for the first time in Sunderland, my home town.”
From his studio in Nashville, Stewart says that “now Shekhar Kapur has decided to direct this movie, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.”
Kapur observes, ”What I love about Ebony McQueen is that,without saying it,it’s so spiritual.”
He’ll also reunite and work “with the genius of” three-time Olivier Award winner and Tony Award nominee Sharon D. Clarke (Death of a Salesman, Red, White & Royal Blue) after they first worked together in London on Ghost: The Musical, the stage adaptation of classic 1990 movie Ghost. Clarke’s attached to play the titular character in Ebony McQueen, a sort of blues voodoo queen fantasy figure who, like a fairy godmother from Memphis, tells the young Dave Stewart character to follow his musical dreams.
Clarke is preparing to play Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest alongside Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa at the National Theatre from November 20-January 25.
Another local Sunderland lad, Tom A. Smith, a zestful up-and-coming northern rocker who tours with his band, will play Charlie McGarvey, the semi-autobiographical Stewart character.
“We are now at the beginning of a very exciting casting journey,” Stewart says, and he reveals that the film has “some more great actors in mind.”
The movie will feature British, South Asian and American talent, and the search is on for a young actor to play the South Asian girl next door that Charlie McGarvey falls for.
The Dave Stewart Entertainment production will be produced by Stewart, Parfitt for Trademark Films, and David Jacobson (Lee Daniels’ The Butler, The Falconer) for Dave Stewart Entertainment.
Malcolm Gerrie (Ibiza: The Silent Movie, Andrea Bocelli: Because I Believe) will executive produce for Whizz Kid Entertainment, a division of Lionsgate TV.
The film’s story will be underpinned by the late-’60s cultural revolution that clashed with the social and economic upheavals of the early 1970s.
Stewart’s musical tastes were forged by his father’s collection of classic Rodgers & Hammerstein soundtracks and later by the blues records from Memphis that he listened to while he was recuperating from his shattered knee.
He can remember his dad building a record player, amplifier and speakers in his tiny workshop in the backyard of the tiny terraced house where they lived in Sutherland’s Barnard Street. “This was at the end of the ’50s when I was about 6 years old. I woke up one morning with “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” from South Pacific blasting out of his homemade speaker cabinets. “It was the loudest, most joyous sound I’d ever heard,” he recalls.
His father bought more Rodgers & Hammerstein soundtracks “and we heard them every morning before school. That was the only music I knew by heart,” he says wistfully, “until I was nearly 15, when my dream of being a footballer was shattered along with my kneecap. Then my older cousin Ian sent a couple of blues albums from Memphis, and this music blew my mind along with my brother’s record collection of Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, the Rolling Stones.
“Then I switched on the radio and — boom! My mind exploded.”
Stewart has sold in excess of 100 million albums worldwide in a career he has sustained for nearly five decades. Not just with Eurythmics but also as a solo artist who has recorded his own work, composed for movies, and produced for other artists. The Eurythmics hit “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and the U.S. Library of Congress National Recording Registry, and Stewart’s the recipient of many other entertainment industry honors.
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