Bowie & Buster

Another great cinematic what-if was a planned Buster Keaton biopic starring David Bowie in the role of the Great Stone Face. Apart from a few pics of Bowie reading Rudi Blesh’s 1966 biography of Keaton during some downtime on The Man Who Fell To Earth production, I don’t think the project advanced very far but Buster was still on Bowie’s mind in 1993 when he appeared as the comic in the video for the Black Tie White Noise single Miracle Goodnight. A more substantial unrealized film project, first mooted in the early 80’s was Derek Jarman’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi film Neutron which would have featured David Bowie and Steven Berkoff as two opposing warriors of the wasteland. Ultimately the film fell through and Jarman funneled some of Neutron's ideas into his 1988 film The Last of England but in 1999, five years after Jarman’s death Bowie was still speaking enthusiastically about the project: "I want to approach his family at some time to see if we could do something with it. I have his script and his drawings. I even know down to the music how he wanted to have things done. And it would be lovely posthumously to do his piece. It would be fabulous. A wonderful script, a very scary piece of work.”