Labour of Love

It may be the greatest music film that never got made. Love In Vain, the life and times of blues avatar Robert Johnson, written by Alan Greenberg, was the first unproduced screenplay to be published as literature by a major house, Doubleday, back in 1990. Your correspondent picked up a copy of it some years ago and was knocked out by the rich, lyrical language, the pictures it painted of an occult southern nocturama, and the poetic resonance of the subject.

Martin Scorsese, who at one time was mooted to direct the film for Warner Bros, wrote in the preface of the book’s second edition, published by Da Capo, “Alan’s unique style captures the Mississippi Delta in images of stark sensuality and matter-of-fact pain and poverty that are the very essence of Johnson’s music. In its mix of Depression-era realism with Southern black folklore, I see the script less as a literal history than a spiritual biography.
“Johnson is like some haunted prophet who must go into the desert to find his voice, and who plays his music not out of choice but because he has no choice; he has become possessed by the spirit of the blues. That the script represents this possession as a literal pact with the devil – this was the legend of Johnson’s extraordinary guitar skill – only speaks to the existential predicament of all artists – and one of the cruel paradoxes of human nature – that our finest art is born from the wellspring of pain.”
On its original publication, Love In Vain was praised to the heavens by every major American blues scholar on the faculty, from Robert Palmer to Greil Marcus to Peter Guralnick (whose speculative 1989 biography Searching For Robert Johnson was itself something of a small masterpiece). Keith Richards was moved to comment, “Finally someone has captured the central feel of this master musician and his times, and that man is Alan Greenberg.”
Now there are whispers that the film is finally slated for production at the end of this year, starring Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs in the title role, which may not be the casting farrago it first appears. Combs is a way better actor than MC (his turn as a condemned man in Monster’s Ball was particularly impressive). Plus, he’s an unlikely ringer for the young Johnson. There’s also talk of a documentary about Greenberg’s struggle to make Love In Vain, entitled Robert Johnson in Hell, to be directed by Michael Almereyda. Meantime, the book is more than worthy testament to that long-held vision.