Madonna isn’t too excited about a planned feature movie that will follow her early years as an aspiring material girl in gritty 1980s New York.
“Nobody knows what I know and what I have seen,” she said in an Instagram post on Tuesday. “Only I can tell my story. Anyone else who tries is a charlatan and a fool.”
The film — named after the singer’s seminal 1990 tour, “Blond Ambition,” which brought Jean Paul Gaultier’s conical bras to the world stage — was written by Elyse Hollander and topped last year’s Black List, the annual industry compendium of the best unproduced screenplays.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Universal has bought the script, and the film’s producers include Brett Ratner’s RatPac Entertainment, and Michael De Luca, who produced the 2017 Oscars; “Moneyball” (2011); and the “Fifty Shades of Grey” movie franchise, appropriate enough considering Madonna’s sadomasochistic forays in her 1992 coffee table book, “Sex.”
The film follows Madonna’s early efforts to break into the music industry, several years after she had arrived in Manhattan from Michigan in the late ’70s as an aspiring dancer. By the early ’80s, after she’d sung in several rock bands, she struggled to get her first album produced.
Her tenacity obviously paid off. That debut album, “Madonna,” released in 1983, produced the hits “Holiday,” “Lucky Star” and “Borderline,” and started her on the path to superstardom.
Messages to Universal, Ms. Hollander and Mr. De Luca were not immediately returned.
An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of a RatPac Entertainment executive. His name is Brett Ratner, not Bret Ratner.
