‘A Complete Unknown’ producer working on films about Syd Barrett and Cass Elliot

A producer who worked on the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown is set to turn his attention to films about Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett and The Mamas & The Papas‘ Cass Elliot.

• READ MORE: ‘A Complete Unknown’ review: don’t think twice about seeing this brilliant Bob Dylan biopic

Peter Jaysen owns the company, Veritas Entertainment, that was involved in securing the rights to Dylan’s musical archive and life story for the Timothée Chalamet-starring biopic. In an appearance on the The Town With Matthew Belloni, he revealed that more big-name projects were in motion.

“Due to our involvement with Bob doing A Complete Unknown, we’ve been fortunate enough that right now we’re working on, with Wash Westmoreland, the great writer-director, a Syd Barrett movie, one of the founders of Pink Floyd,” he confirmed.

“We have had multiple Zooms with the estate of Mama Cass Elliot and met with her daughter, Owen, and are close to acquiring the rights to her book, My Mama Cass.”

Jaysen didn’t mention release dates for either biopic nor give any timelines for their production.

Barrett founded Pink Floyd in 1965 as their frontman and principal songwriter before leaving in 1968 over issues with his drug use and mental health. He spent the rest of his life out of the spotlight in Cambridge until he passed away in 2006.

Meanwhile, Elliot, better known as Mama Cass, rose to fame as a member of The Mamas and the Papas in the 1960s. She died in 1974 at the age of 32.

In a four-star review of A Complete Unknown, NME wrote: “So many of the performances in A Complete Unknown fizz with this kind of tense, gripping energy – whether it’s because Dylan and Baez are bickering through ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ or he’s managed to bottle the anxiety of an entire city awaiting nuclear armageddon in a Cold War protest song.

“The most important (and often trickiest) job of any music movie is to get the music right. And this nails that. If you’re a Bob newbie, you’ll leave the cinema ready to dive into his back catalogue. If you’re already a fan, the next few weeks will be spent making playlists of lesser-known B-sides or reading the lore around a scene you weren’t familiar with. And that’s why it was a good idea to make this film – a mad idea, but a good one.”

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