Before Gary Busey played Buddy Holly in the successful 1978 Columbia Pictures production, he had already been cast as Crickets drummer Jerry Allison in an earlier project called Three-Sided Coin. That film was intended to draw on a screenplay written by Allison and Tom Drake, a script containing personal details about Holly that later proved valuable to Busey. The project nevertheless became an ill-fated production: 20th Century Fox cancelled it after pressure from Fred Bauer and his company, which had made agreements connected to the Holly estate. The collapse illustrates the control that estates, rights-holders, and competing production arrangements could exert over a musician’s screen biography. Busey subsequently used what he had learned from the abandoned film and from conversations with Allison to deepen his portrayal of Holly, contributing to the performance’s celebrated authenticity. The strange result was that a failed, rights-entangled Holly project helped prepare the actor for the film that ultimately reached theaters and earned him an Oscar nomination.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
The Aborted Three-Sided Coin and the Legal Pressure Behind Gary Busey's Holly Performance
The Buddy Holly Story / Three-Sided Coin / 1970s
Before Gary Busey played Buddy Holly in the successful 1978 Columbia Pictures production, he had already been cast as Crickets drummer Jerry Allison in an earlier project called Three-Sided Coin. That film was intended to draw on a screenplay written by Allison and Tom Drake, a script containing personal details about Holly that later proved valuable to Busey. The project nevertheless became an ill-fated production: 20th Century Fox cancelled it after pressure from Fred Bauer and his company, which had made agreements connected to the Holly estate. The collapse illustrates the control that estates, rights-holders, and competing production arrangements could exert over a musician’s screen biography. Busey subsequently used what he had learned from the abandoned film and from conversations with Allison to deepen his portrayal of Holly, contributing to the performance’s celebrated authenticity. The strange result was that a failed, rights-entangled Holly project helped prepare the actor for the film that ultimately reached theaters and earned him an Oscar nomination.
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