It appears that Roger Daltrey’s long-simmering hopes to make a biopic about Keith Moon are finally materializing.
An exclusive report in Variety this week reveals that shooting on a film about Moon, the late drummer for The Who, will begin in the UK this summer, with Daltrey and Pete Townshend as executive producers. No information has yet been released on who will be cast to play the iconic percussionist.
With The Real Me as the working title—drawn from a song on the band’s “Quadropenia” album, the film will be directed by Paul Whittington with a script by Jeff Pope. Whittington’s directorial credits include The Crown and White House Farm, and Pope was nominated for an Academy Award for Philomena.
Industry sources say White Horse Pictures will be producing the biopic.
The Los Angeles-based firm is known for its share of British Invasion films, including George Harrison: Living in the Material World by Martin Scorsese and the Beatles flick Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years by Ron Howard.
The rambunctious drummer Keith Moon joined The Who in 1964, when he was scarcely 18, just as British bands like The Beatles were wowing American audiences with the new Mersey sound. Moon quickly emerged as the bad boy of the lot, injecting pranks and pyrotechnics into his percussion routines, like blowing up his drum kit on stage. He also showed evidence of drug and alcohol addiction, succumbing to a drug overdose in 1978 when he was just 32.
Daltry told a GQ interviewer in 2018 that Keith Moon “lived his entire life as a fantasy. He was the funniest man I’ve ever known, but he was also the saddest…a deeply troubled character,” adding that Moon was “much misunderstood.
There was madness in his eyes, but he had sophistication and he had terrible sadness.”
This would not be the first time that the now-septuagenarian Daltrey and Townshend have been connected with a film about the iconic band of which they were a part. In 2007, they were involved with the documentary Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who. Two earlier films from the 1970s had been inspired by the band: Tommy and Quadrophenia Live : The Who.