Never Made Movies - No.2 David Permut's Sam Kinison Biopic

The firebrand comedian's story would make for great cinema. If only someone would bankroll it.

If you don’t know who David Permut is, he’s the Oscar-nominated producer of films like Dragnet, Face/Off, Youth In Revolt and Hacksaw Ridge. If you don’t know who Sam Kinison is, you simply can’t get up to speed quickly enough.

A former preacher who used his ferocious speaking skills to become the to-the-edge comedian of the 1980s, it’s no stretch to say that, without Samuel Burl Kinison,
we wouldn’t have had Bill Hicks. But while the Goat Boy was primarily interested in politics and social justice, Sam was all about sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

The furthest thing from your grandfather’s kind of comedian, Sam Kinison was adored by rock acts like Motley Crue and Billy Idol. And as he enjoyed the company of such performers, he took great joy in outdoing them in the excess stakes. That he lived to be 38 was incredible given what he was known to ingest. That he died stone-cold sober in an accident caused by a drunk driver was a tragedy.

But what kind of film might the Sam Kinison story have been? According to David Permut, “the tone of the movie was Raging Bull only with comedy.” And while certain members of the Kinison clan might have preferred that story of their black sheep remained under wraps, Permut’s project was endorsed by the family: Bill Kinison have granted the producer the rights to his book Brother Sam.

All David Permut needed to do now was i) find someone to play the walking Molotov cocktail of a comic, and ii) raise the $5 million he thought he’d need to bring the film to fruition. A quarter-of-a-century, the wait for both continues…