Dali, Hollywood and a surreal story

Salvador Dali. Photo / Supplied

With his trademark upturned wax moustache and penchant for giving lectures in a diving bell, Salvador Dali thrived on courting controversy and enjoyed a wildly eccentric lifestyle.

Throughout his life, his detractors said the man was more concerned with cultivating his own avant-garde image than the quality of his artistic output. Friends, meanwhile, staunchly defended the Spanish painter, saying that he simply lived his brand of Surrealism as much as he painted it.

But when a little-known Belgian art dealer, who is also a former convict, published a memoir alleging that the majority of late Dali works were faked and were done so with the artist's approval, it still managed to send shockwaves through an art world which was long used to fantastical claims about one of its most fantastical members.

Now Stan Lauryssens' book is being turned into a major Hollywood production with Al Pacino lined up to play the Spanish surrealist as he neared the end of his life. The film is one of three Dali biopics in production which reveal just how much Hollywood has succumbed to a newfound "Dalimania" two decades after the painter's death.

Producers of all three films will be keen to finish their projects as quickly as possible: early release dates will be crucial.

When two films based on the life of the writer Truman Capote were released in quick succession the later release suffered from poor attendance figures while the former raked in the dollars and went on to win a Best Actor Oscar for Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

The first film to reach cinemas is likely to be Little Ashes, a British biopic, starring Harry Potter actor Robert Pattison, about Dali's avant-garde teenage years in 1920s Madrid. The film centres around his sexually ambiguous friendships with the poet Frederico Garcia Lorca and aspiring film maker Luis Bunuel and will be released in the US this year.

The second film, Dali, directed by the British film maker Simon West, will star Antonio Banderas in the leading role and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Dali's sexually-charged wife Gala.

But it is the adaptation of the memoir Dali & I: The Surreal Story by the 63-year-old former cheesemaker turned successful art dealer, who was chased for years by Interpol and eventually imprisoned for selling thousands of fake Dali works, that is likely to be the most controversial. Cinemagoers will have to wait until 2011 to see it.

In Spain, where Dali is considered a national hero, Lauryssens' book caused outrage not only because it claimed that Dali was directly linked to a vast fake production network of his paintings but also because it described salacious details of Dali's sex life.

- INDEPENDENT