James Earl Jones in author Ben Bryant’s entertainment book, “Circumstances Beyond My Control”

Circumstances 2 smaller

In 1979, long before I ever thought of writing an

entertainment book,

I  met a blues aficionado named Gene Heimlich who wanted to make a movie about one of the seminal giants of the genre and James Earl Jones was in our heads from the moment we teamed up on the project.

“Robert Leroy Johnson (1911 –1938) was an American blues singer and musician. His landmark recordings from 1936 and ’37 display an extraordinary combination of singing, guitar skills, and song writing talent. Johnson’s shadowy life and death at age twenty-seven (or so) have given rise to much speculation. As an itinerant performer who played mostly on street corners, in juke joints and at Saturday night dances, Johnson enjoyed little commercial success in his lifetime. However he – through the dozen or so of his original songs that he recorded – is considered to be a primary influence on many if not all of the blues and rock musicians of the 1950s through the ‘80s.

“While I found the stories Gene told of Johnson – most gleaned from the interview tapes – fascinating I felt that a straight biographical movie about a musician who was unknown to the general public – though idolized by serious blues fans – had little chance of arousing interest. I suggested that a fictional dramatic story built around the Johnson legend might be more compelling. After some intense discussion he came around to this point of view and we began to brainstorm story ideas.

“We came up at last with a fictional protagonist, a black historian we called “James Ellison”. We called him Jones for a while since we always envisioned James Earl as our star. Jones/Ellison was troubled by a recurring dream about a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938 that never really happened. In actual history, a Blues concert was to have taken place introducing Robert Johnson to the big-time music world but he was killed before it was scheduled to occur.

“Anyhow we constructed a mystery story about this character who, although a Southern black, was very much a white establishment guy. The scenario contained the sort of sci-fi element of time lapses wherein Ellison flashed back to his repressed youthful involvement with Johnson and thereby we told his story.

“We kicked this idea around for weeks and in the process, told the story several times to friends. But we needed a treatment*.

(* A film treatment is a piece of prose, typically the step before the first draft of a screenplay for a motion picture. It is generally longer and more detailed than an outline and may include details of directorial style. A treatment reads like a short story.)

“One evening we told our story to Robbie Austin, a friend of Gene’s who was a copywriter for one of the major ad agencies. Robbie had written one of the most memorable ad slogans of all time: “Everybody doesn’t like something but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.” We were saying that we needed a treatment and Robbie told us that we already had one but it was oral. He suggested that we tell it again to someone else, record the telling then transcribe it and clean it up and we’d have our treatment. So that’s what we did. It only took about twenty drafts.
…
“In May my friend Raul Julia (whom I knew from The Hunger Project) connected Gene and me with James Earl Jones. We sent him a draft of the treatment in progress and a few days later met him for lunch at Chelsea’s Empire Diner. The first thing he said was that, having read the treatment, he was shocked to see that we were both white. We accepted this as a great compliment. By the way: He really does talk like that. We were calling him Mr. Jones which he said wasn’t necessary. I asked what we should call him and he said something like, “Well you can call me Jim or you can call me Jimmy Earl or you can call me James but ‘ya doesn’t have to call me Jones’.” We roared with laughter. If you don’t get the joke watch this, a popular bit in the ‘70s.

“We had a great time with Jim. He was a fan of Robert Johnson and he obviously liked the treatment or we wouldn’t have been having lunch. He asked us who we had in mind to play RJ. Gene said Jimmy Cliff, the Jamaican reggae singer. Jim heartily concurred. We parted company with the promise that we’d send him a script as soon as we had a draft.
By September (‘78) we had a complete proposal together bearing the title of one of RJ’s songs: Crossroads.”

To learn what happened with this and many other projects: Buy Circumstances Beyond My Control

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