I Am Making the Red Hot Chili Peppers Screen Adaptation
Thanks to years of teenage obsession and the power of Artificial Intelligence, my dreams are now a reality
When I was a teenager, my favorite band in the world was the Red Hot Chili Peppers. My friends and I bonded over our love of them, constantly listening to them and trying to learn songs by them on our respective instruments. We were a little band just like them. We watched concert films endlessly. We hunted down rare B-sides on Limewire and infected our parents’ computers with heinous viruses.
We read books about the band and, when things like YouTube became more robust, sought out seldom-seen video interviews from early on in their careers or from random foreign TV shows.
The way movie characters – like the teens in “Detroit Rock City” or the old women in “Eighty for Brady” – were united in their shared affection for something as a unit, we were like that.
This led to encyclopedic knowledge of the band members, their songs, their gear, their lives, their likes and dislikes, what kind of shoes they wore on stage; not to mention the actual career arc of the band, spanning record deals, battles with addiction, deaths, new members, old members.
It’s funny how much capacity we have for obsessive information storage as teenagers. The kids who can harness that ability to learn and absorb data, and focus it on things like school and sports often have a lot to show for it. But, my little obsessions with music and bands has turned into a neat little career getting paid occasionally to write about them, so I don’t know that I’d change a lot. Also, it’s still fun for this group of us to listen to the Chili Peppers whenever we’re together, though now it’s before one of us gets married instead of while drinking beer in a shed.
RHCP has been around for a long time now. That career trajectory is the kind of story that Hollywood mines and turns into dramatized biopics on the regular. Over the last half decade or so, the studios and streaming services have churned out movies and shows about bands like Mötley Crüe, Wu-Tang Clan, Sex Pistols and NWA to varying degrees of quality. There’s no doubt that at least one suit in Hollywood has approached someone from the Chili Peppers about adapting their story to the screen. I know there was a series in development for a while about Anthony Kiedis’ childhood, but that never came to fruition.
Over the last year, I’ve sort of re-connected with the band on a curiosity level, which in turn has made me connect with the music again. Leading up to their two new albums last year, the band did multiple hours-spanning podcast interviews with producer Rick Rubin, which of course I just got around to listening to this week. These conversations with guys I “knew” so well still yielded new-to-me information, and I again felt that spark to learn more about them, to connect the stories to the songs, and it made me appreciate the new albums more than I did when they first came out. A few months before this, I read Flea’s memoir “Acid for the Children,” which is about his life up until the Chili Peppers started, so in hindsight it feels like a fun prequel to the conversations that I’ve now been immersing myself in again, connecting with my teenage self who might be a little disappointed I chose not to engage too deeply with two new albums with John Frusciante back just like he used to be, and for the most part turning my back on the thing that linked my inseparable group of friends, which is now spread across the country due to the nature of growing up.
All of this is to say that I’ve been back on my Chili Pepper bullshit like I was when I was 15. Only now I’m 30, writing professionally about music and culture and the way we interact with it. The band, now more years into it than I’ve been alive, is perfect for one of these biopics, and I trust that with my loser-level knowledge of the band, understanding of story structure, semester of film classes before switching my major to journalism, and just a little bit of technological magic, I am the guy to put this together.
And in this, the year 2023, my dreams don’t need to stay dreams.
I got a press email about a month ago about how some AI program created a cast for a hypothetical live action Mario Bros. movie based on fan votes on IMDB. Rather than being force-fed Chris Pratt as Mario, they instead wanted Oscar Isaac. I feel like Chris Pratt’s Mario would try to convince the rest of the plumbers he works with (including Luigi) not to unionize. Also, is Oscar Isaac even Italian? Not important.
Anyway, the press release was full of high quality images of Isaac looking sad in a Mario costume, Paul Rudd looking youthful as always as Luigi, Reese Witherspoon as Peach, and poor Tom Holland as Toad.
No longer, it promised, would fans have to wonder what their preferred casting choices would look like. They could see their Mario movie more clearly than their mind’s eye could ever render it.
A miracle.
Another instance where the internet has replaced real-life conversations – more specifically, arguments.
There are no more arguments because all of the information in the world is at our fingertips. The answer is right there. And, to that same point, there’s no need to discuss who would work as certain movie characters or what it would look like, because an AI program can draw it up for you in seconds.
The ethics of AI art are a totally different discussion – one that I will not be engaging in right now.
Instead, I’ll focus on something else: The fact that Substack has integrated an AI image-generation feature for posts, and I want to give it a spin. My hypothetical Red Hot Chili Peppers movie/series just became a little less hypothetical and much more realistic.
Now you’ll get to see my casting decisions in glorious AI-generated realism.
Anthony Kiedis
This is arguably the most important casting decision. Kiedis, being the frontman, is going to be a focal point protagonist. Musically, the Chili Peppers are four equally crucial parts. The band doesn’t work without equal output, and that’s why they’ve had so much turnover unrelated to substance abuse or death. But, from a marketing standpoint, Kiedis is a frontman.
In my head, this movie or series takes place from the end of the ‘80s era of the band, where they’re reeling from the loss of original guitarist Hillel Slovak after his drug overdose, wondering where to go next, getting John Frusciante, and revitalizing the band and taking it to new heights with Mother’s Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik. It will likely go somewhere beyond that, too, since it’s not like the band just rode off into the sunset from there.
With all of this in mind, I need to think about someone who can play a younger Kiedis as well as Kiedis in his late 30s and maybe even early 40s. Kiedis, now about to turn 60, still has a youthful energy about him. His hair is still black, and he’s still pretty muscular in an impossible Iggy Pop way. The actor who plays him needs to have that same sort of agelessness.
And for that reason, I am selecting Justin Long.
Slap a tribal arm tattoo on there and you’ve got AK.
Look at them side by side at a hypothetical press event for the series. They look identical.
I believe Justin Long could put on a little bit of muscle to look the part, and that he still has movie-star-quality looks to match Kiedis’ own goofy handsomeness. His hair falls the same way, and the mustache he had in Tusk is very similar to the one Kiedis has now. I’m confident in Long’s commitment to the part, and I think his performance might surprise some people.
John Frusciante
This one is so easy. I’ve had this in my head for a while now, even before I started forming this idea on “paper.” It’s Jay Baruchel.
I remember seeing him in Knocked Up as one of Seth Rogen’s burnout roommates, and he had that weird sort of thick mohawk that John had. He already has the skinniness down, and they even sort of speak similarly. Jay would just need to add a little bit of raspiness to his voice to emulate Frusciante’s after years of extraordinarily hard living. Frusciante’s voice is so good though, man. On both RHCP albums and his solo stuff, which is criminally overlooked. I wish he would cool it a little bit on the synthesizers and go back to some of his more guitar-focused solo stuff. Albums like Shadows Collide with People are incredible. When The Empyrean came out in 2009, his album bio said something about how the songs are best heard in dark living rooms. So, being 16-year-old weirdos, my friends and I went straight from the FYE at the Capital City Mall to one of our basements, turned off all the lights, and listened to it without saying anything to each other, just like John had instructed us to. We replicated the experience in the future in the shed, too. In a recent Esquire profile, Kieran Culkin said he used to rollerblade around Manhattan listening to John Frusciante CD’s. Maybe we would’ve been friends.
Anyway, Jay Baruchel will be John Frusciante. Done and dusted. No more auditions.
Chad Smith
I bet you think I’m going to say Will Farrell here, don’t you? WRONG. Low hanging fruit.
He’ll have a cameo maybe, but the role will really be played by the kid from Stranger Things. Billy. He was in that disappointing Power Rangers re-boot, too. Dacre Montgomery.
Now you’re thinking “Brendan, Will Farrell and Chad Smith look so similar that they’ve been beating this joke to death on late night TV.” I know. But this movie isn’t just about 2011. This is about the earlier days, and I need someone who can capture Chad Smith right out of Detroit as a Midwestern kid who loved hair metal, not middle-aged backwards-flatbrim Chad Smith.
Look at Chad Smith as a bandanna-rocking Sunset Strip guy. Dacre Montgomery could pull that off, just like he did when he had to do ‘80s cosplay in “Stranger Things.”
Yes, I know he’s shorter than Chad, too. But that’s movie magic, baby. Tom Cruise is like 4 feet tall, and yet they put him on an apple crate and suddenly he’s Hakeem Olajuwon.
The other thing about adapting a real-life story to the screen is that casting decisions don’t have to be spot-on. Hollywood is full of incredibly beautiful people. The world is not. Occasionally, an interesting-yet-average-looking person is going to need to be played by someone a few notches up on the handsome scale.
Flea
This one might have been the hardest for me. If Kiedis is the A1 frontman focal point, Flea is the second-most important one, and he’s not far behind Kiedis. Given the nature of their friendship, beginning when they were just 15 and instantly becoming inseparable, their relationship would be a key part of the movie.
Listening to so many of his interviews and reading his book, he is a complex, intelligent and spiritual guy. Anyone else saying the stuff he says, and you’d be like “What the hell is this guy’s deal?” But with Flea, it just seems natural and real. He’s ageless but getting wrinkly. Playful and child-like with a mature taste in art and music that pre-dates him by centuries.
Maybe it was bias of having just seen Green Room for the first time, but my first thought was Anton Yelchin, who plays bass in that movie. But, unfortunately, Yelchin tragically passed away in 2016.
Then I thought that I might just have to find Flea’s actor in central casting. Some no-name kid out of Julliard who we haven’t seen in anything other than a few commercials. But then I started looking at this one picture of a young Flea and River Phoenix, allowing my mind’s eye to drift like I’m trying to see the hidden image in one of those trick paintings. The answer was there, but I just couldn’t see it – until I did.
He’s small. He has piercing, friendly blue eyes. He has famously gapped front teeth.
It’s Elijah Wood.
There’s a lot more involved in this process than just casting the main characters in the band. Would I force the actors to learn their own instruments? Maybe even play a little bit for real for the soundtrack? Will the band members make cameos as some characters so far off from their real-life selves, like stuffy waiters, police officers, or maybe a mean dad who doesn’t want his kid getting into all of that rock music?
In terms of story structure, like I said, I think a series would work best because it would allow me to really explore the plot lines within the band’s dynamic from the tragic loss of Hillel, deciding where to go, finding this wunderkind in 18-year-old John Frusciante and becoming international stars, ending with Frusciante’s struggles and departure before eventually returning to a band now on their way to cleaner living and continued success after One Hot Minute with Dave Navarro.
Scenes like Frusciante’s meltdown on Saturday Night Live would make for great episodes. And since people apparently love the inner workings of highly successful business entities, a la Succession, we could squeeze a few hours out of the band just figuring out how to replace Frusciante, deciding on where to go next, etc.
This, of course, would require a few more casting decisions for these peripheral characters. Truthfully, I haven’t nailed exactly who would play Hillel Slovak yet, but I do have my Rick Rubin character:
It’s John C. Reilly.
I don’t have an end point figured out yet either. It’s hard to make a real “ending” when the band keeps popping back up and being like “Nope, not done yet. You thought!” It’s easy to end a movie about the Sex Pistols or Wu-Tang, and you can only expect audiences to watch Machine Gun Kelly do a Tommy Lee impression for two hours before begging for mercy.
Does it end with John Frusciante returning to record and release Californication? Does it end somewhere in the ‘90s and fade into a present-day moment where maybe I will allow Will Farrell to play Chad Smith?
Maybe it cuts to an aerial shot across an idyllic suburban-bordering-on-rural town in Central Pennsylvania ca. 2006. A school bell rings, and four fourteen-year-old best friends of varying heights gear themselves up all day at school for that evening, when they’ll go to Philadelphia to see their favorite band in real life.
Just like the rat at the end of The Departed served as an extremely subtle metaphor, these four boys serve as stand-ins for the four members of the band or something. Symmetry. The power of deep friendship through music or something.
Fade to black. Credits.
Executive Producer - Brendan Menapace
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Indigo De Souza.
Great stuff Brendan! Keep ‘em coming!