Making of the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main Street may get the dramatic movie treatment

While the Keith Richards-reported news that Keith Richards is helping to make a movie about Keith Richards has, surprisingly, yet to take more concrete shape, Deadline claims that another slightly fictionalized Rolling Stones film is in the works based on Robert Greenfield's 2008 account Exile On Main Street: A Season In Hell With The Rolling Stones. In descending order of the weight they were given in Greenfield's book, the story covers the era when the Stones holed up in the south of France, entertained a gaggle of '60s celebrities and assorted local characters, plowed through epic amounts of drugs, gave Greenfield the inspiration to insert overwrought Shakespeare allusions, and also happened to record an album or something. Now that plenty-well-documented time period will get another dramatic retelling courtesy of Richard Branson, who took time out of playing with his spaceships to option the film rights through the Virgin Produced arm of his vast multimedia-and-flying-machines company. Although Branson definitely has a Stones "in," having released the group's last three albums through the Virgin label, as with Keith Richards' proposed Life and the Brian Jones movie Stoned before it, the deal doesn't as yet include the music rights. Fortunately, Greenfield's book suggests you don't even really need them.