In November 2008 Variety reported that Antonio Banderas was “in final negotiations” to portray Dali in an independent biographical film titled simply “DALI”.

It was to be directed by Simon “Tomb Raider” West, who’d been developing the project since 2003 from a script by Jeremy Walters.

The movie, co-produced by West, Jib Polhemus and Media 8 Entertainment (”Monster”), was to begin shooting in the first quarter of 2009 in Spain and England. Catherine Zeta-Jones was set to portray Gala.

Variety.com said the flick would “blend music with CGI sequences in an effort to capture the inventiveness and colour of the painter” and “explore how Dali conquered America and the world with sex, sin and surrealism, only to succumb later to worldwide scandal and misfortune”.

In other words, the sensational stuff. The Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation moved swiftly.

“The movie right now is stopped,” Banderas was telling ComingSoon.net by June 2009, “because we have to fix some problems we have with the foundation. There is a certain side of our script.”

In his film’s defence, Banderas pointed out that Dali’s final years were “tough”. “He was literally kidnapped by a family that tried to make money with him. This is a guy who actually signed around 150,000 lithography papers, so he was manipulated for money, producing probably what has been one of the biggest scandals in modern art.”

The foundation, he said, was “not very happy” that the Dali fraud was going to get even more publicity. “So we’re still in negotiation with them.”

The film “was going to be a surrealistic movie”, Banderas continued. “We were going to see him stepping into his paintings and everything that surrounds him is part of his surreal mind. You could see that, and now with CGI, it’s very easy to do that on the screen.”

A teaser clip of sorts promoting “Being Dali” but relying heavily on imagery from elsewhere is online here.

The foundation rejected 11 film scripts in the six years up to 2009, according to an article in Panama’s HoraCero magazine. Seeking to bolster Dali’s stature in 20th-century art, the last think it wants is a bad movie about him that’s successful, manager José Sevillano was quoted as saying.

Dali’s life, Jose pointed out, probably for the hundredth time, was interesting enough that nothing needs to be fictionalised. “It is not our intention to censure,” he said, but to strictly guard against disrespect and untruth.

“It is not just a few elements of the script that is a problem but the entire concept of the film,” an unidentified foundation source told the London Telegraph, which also noted Banderas’ characterisation of director West as “British, very stubborn and pig-headed”, and thus unwilling to compromise.

Plenty of lurid nonsense might also be in store from “DALI & I: THE SURREAL STORY”. Whether Hollywood ever actually gets around to making this one remains to be seen, but despite the ugly prospects, the project’s detractors would certainly be vastly outnumbered by the crowds at the box office.

For one thing, it was also a movie about Dali. For another, it was supposed to have Al Pacino playing him.

Pacino would definitely be the silver lining to a cloud rendered thunderously dark by the source: a purported memoir by crime-fiction novelist and convicted fraud Stan Lauryssens.

Lauryssens secured global publicity for the book and the movie by declaring that fully half of all Dali artwork on the market today is fake.

Again, the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation slammed the door. It filed a defamation complaint against Lauryssens and urged Pacino to give the movie project a miss. José Sevillano “travelled several times to Los Angeles to meet with different producers”, according to HoraCero.

A wannabe match for Dali in showmanship but with neither the imagination or the talent for it, the Belgian was formerly a journalist.

He interviewed Thor Heyerdahl, Charles de Gaulle, Andy Warhol and Nazi admiral Karl Dönitz, among others, but he specialised in showbiz yarns, concocting stories when the facts lacked flair.

He got involved in selling fake art, including bogus Dali prints, and did time in jail for it, and then on his release hooked up with Dali in Cadaques. It’s on the basis of his wayward life and the period spent in the maestro’s company that his 2008 book “Dali & I” is being sold.

Lauryssens has the unfortunate habit of describing his relationship with Dali as “mentor-protegé”. This has to be an extreme stretch of the truth.

He continued claiming for months on his single-track website that the film version was forthcoming.

Room 9 Entertainment purchased the rights and Oscar nominee Andrew Niccol was supposed to direct, from his own screenplay rewrite, ostensibly teaming up again with Al Pacino, who he guided in “S1m0ne”. (The pic here is just my mock-up, and, okay, so is the one of Banderas above.)

Opposite Pacino’s Dali would be Cillian Murphy as Lauryssens.

In a late-2008 interview with the website SimplyDali.com, titled with perhaps inadvertent irony “Faking it”, Lauryssens quotes producer David Sacks as telling Variety and The Hollywood Reporter that Pacino and Benicio del Toro were “high on our wish-list and so are Johnny Depp, Gary Oldman and Ian McKellen”.

He points out that he’d presented himself in his book as a 40-year-old Belgian art dealer, while the film script depicts him as a 28-year-old New Yorker who chain-smokes and loves cocaine. Only the skirt-chasing aspect is true, he says.

As late as December 2008, Film.com was reporting that both the Pacino and the Banderas projects were still in the works.

It also cited the undying rumour that Johnny Depp was in the market for a Dali script, and that Peter O’Toole was supposed to play the maestro in “Goodbye Dali”, a “comedy” to be produced by David Permut.

Film.com said this last project was to be “based on a Yaniv Raz and Allen Rich screenplay, it reportedly revisits Rich’s real-life friendship with Dali as a young art dealer in Spain”.

And, noting the messy collision that year of two different Truman Capote biopics, the website fretted over the likelihood of “multiple Dalis duking it out” at the Oscars, with no guarantee that any of the films would win, and the very real possibility that all might turn out to be duds.

Later in 2009 Lauryssens, evidently thinking the inferno required more fuel, announced on his website that he’d completed a new typescript, “The Dali Killings”, a work of crime fiction based on the police investigation of the murders near the Perpignan railway station (discussed in this post).

Johnny Depp seems to be the popular favourite for a decent Dali portrayal, and in February 2009 Rotten Tomatoes saw some light on the horizon, suggesting that Tim Burton might direct a movie called “THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY” starring Depp.

Burton was just finishing “Alice in Wonderland” with Depp as the Mad Hatter and developing “Dark Shadows” with Depp as Barnabas the vampire. The Dali biopic would be perfect for the pair, the website said, since the script offered “multiple dream sequences in which Dali imagines his bizarre surrealistic paintings before they find their way to the canvas”.

While a Dali movie biography that most people can agree on is still awaited, “LITTLE ASHES” — which had festival screenings in 2008 ahead of its wide release in 2009 — examined at least one portion of his life, even if it depicted the maestro with his curled moustache long before it appeared.

Robert Pattinson, who shot to stardom with the vampire flick “Twilight” in late 2008, portrays the young Salvador Dali and Javier Beltran plays Federico Garcia Lorca during their school years, delving into a relationship that touched on homosexuality. Matthew McNulty appeared as Luis Buñuel, scorning all signs of intimacy between men.

Directed by Paul Morrison, whose “Solomon and Gaenor” got an Oscar nomination as best foreign-language feature, “Little Ashes” was praised for beautiful cinematography, but by August 2009, when it had nearly completed its global theatrical run, its score on the “tomatometer”at RottenTomatoes.com was a meagre 23%. Fully three-quarters of viewers found it disappointing (or worse). Only Rob Pattinson’s appeal among youngsters had kept it afloat that long.

In 2006 there was “THE DEATH OF SALVADOR DALI”, written and directed by Delaney Bishop. It was never touted as anything more than a fantasy, centred on Dali’s 1938 meeting with Sigmund Freud.

It starred Salvador Benavides as Dali, Bob Cesario as Freud and Dita Von Teese as Gala. Other actors portrayed Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and Luis Bunuel. The official website is here.

For Dali’s own forays into the cinema, see the posts here and here.

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Whether or not the tramontana has some fundamental effect on people’s behaviour seems to be a parlour game that journalists occasionally prod scientists to play. An article cited on the Salvador Dali Forum (with no source given) begins with the usual opening move, this time courtesy of Antoni Bulbena of the Barcelona Psychiatric Institute.

You can’t say that a personality such as Dali’s is a product of the winter wind from the north, the professor reaffirms. The article cites a behavioral study that found a link between the tramontana and personality traits among some people of the Emporda, though no proof that the gusts nurture genius.

But there is a minority opinion among “some experts”, the article continued, that there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the tramontana and the personality of some artists and intellectuals.

Psychoanalyst Carles Frigola is quoted as saying the wind’s extreme dryness modifies fundamental physical “energies”, and the result is evident in “all the inhabitants of the Emporda … although people only remember Salvador Dali or other well-known personages because of the universal dimension of their character”. Frigola said the locals are more excitable when the wind blows.

The article ends, on par, by avowing that the only certainty about the tramontana is that it’s invoked by every writer, musician and graphic artist from the region, from Carles Fages de Climent’s “Oracio to the Crist of the Tramuntana” to Dali’s 1968 “The Crist of the Tramuntana”, with poet Joan Maragall and author Pere Coromines in between.

Only slightly more helpfully, the forum featured another article in June 2003, evidently from someone who had interviewed Dali in July 1985 for the newspaper Today.

Physically feeble and speaking with great dificulty, Dali said he’d wanted to buy the castle at Quermanco, but no one knew the owner’s identity. “I think he lived abroad,” Dali said, though the author points out that the owner was actually living in Vilajuiga at the time.

Dali then set off on “a long digression” that the interviewer and Antoni Pixtot stuggled to follow, about the Grail legend, into which Dali inserted a confluence of Sant Pere de Roda, the chapel of Santa Helena and the castles of Sant Salvador and Quermanco — the last as a shelter for “the magician Klingsor”.

This article mentions another, written by Joan Xirau, which had said Quermanco was name-dropped in Studium, the magazine that Dali and other students at “Figueras High School” produced in 1919.