A few years ago, there was a rumor about a movie in the work, which would portray the legendary singer-songwriters Joni Mitchell, Carol King and Carly Simon, in an adaptation to the big screen of ‘Girls Like Us’. Taylor Swift, the girl of the moment was considered for the role of Joni, and she was, of course, really interested… However, Joni Mitchell has revealed to the UK Sunday Times that she prevented the biopic to be made:
‘I squelched that. I said to the producer, ‘All you’ve got is a girl with high cheekbones.’ It’s just a lot of gossip, you don’t have the great scenes.’
Of course everyone interprets this sentence as if she was dissing Taylor Swift, the girl with high cheekbones, but it is really more a rejection of the movie than the young pop star! Still, she could have been a bit nicer? A bit warmer? A bit flattered that the number 1 star of the moment was picked to incarnate her on the big screen? None of this in her answer, and I can’t believe I am defending Taylor Swift, but Joni has turned into a very strange character, isolated from the world and embittered? In 2013 she refused to have anything to do with a museum or tribute in her hometown of Saskatoon, in interviews she generally assassinates Bob Dylan or another legend and she definitively has a bad opinion about that any book that mentions her:
“There’s a lot of nonsense about me in books. . .assumptions, assumptions, assumptions.’
So she was probably against the idea of Swift taking the daunting task to play her in a movie, and against the idea of a biopic ? I have always thought Joni being a bit on the crazy side, the type who speaks about auras and other esoteric concepts, and a few years ago, she also declared she had Morgellons, a very controversial disease, not even recognized by most doctors who think people with Morgellons are delusional. Patients who claim having the disease, have the impression that insects, parasites are crawling under their skin, that all kinds of fibers are growing out of their body… try to spend a few minutes on youtube watching Morgellons videos and you won’t believe it. Are these people completely insane? They seem to suffer like hell but this is so intertwined with crazy conspiracy theories involving aliens, the FBI and bio-terrorism that most of these videos could be the result of a meth addict’s nightmare. But this seems real, at least the suffering of these people seem totally real and this is what Joni said about her disease in a 2010 LA Times interview:
‘Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer — a terrorist disease: it will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year. But I have a tremendous will to live: I’ve been through another pandemic — I’m a polio survivor, so I know how conservative the medical body can be. In America, the Morgellons is always diagnosed as “delusion of parasites,” and they send you to a psychiatrist. I’m actually trying to get out of the music business to battle for Morgellons sufferers to receive the credibility that’s owed to them.’
So I guess she couldn’t care less about a biopic and some new fashionable hit singer playing her role, if I had a disease that nobody would understand I would dedicate my entire life at finding a cure!
