10 Songs that Could Be Made into Movies

We open on "a dark desert highway, cool wind in your hair..." We'd eventually see a "shimmering light" in the distance and arrive at a desert oasis. A decadent one at that. A grand hotel with a beautiful woman to greet us. "This could be heaven or this could be hell." I see Hotel California as a fantastical-realism classic. Think Vanilla Sky meets Eyes Wide Shut. By the way, the movie poster writes itself. "Welcome to the Hotel California. You can check out any time you life, but you can never leave."

This one takes place in Havana, Cuba. A young American gets involved in a dangerous scheme that goes wrong. He's pursued by a group of thugs and soon realizes he's running out of options. He contacts his father and makes the request for "Lawyers, Guns and Money." And to think it all started when our hero "went home with waitress." After all, how was he to know, "she was with the Russians, too."

"Eddie waited 'til he finished high school

He went to Hollywood, got a tattoo

He met a girl out there with a tattoo too

The future was wide open..."

That's the opening of the song and what sets us up to experience the rags to riches and probably back to rags again tale of Eddie the Rocker. Eddie learned guitar and cut an album. He was living the LA-rocker high-life for a minute. Unfortunately, his album, while good, it wasn't great. In fact, the record company complained that they didn't "hear a single." So he crashed and burned. "A rebel without a clue...under them skies of blue."

Imagine this sci-fi thriller. It tells the tale of Ziggy Stardust, an actual alien and musician who arrives on Earth to spread his message of love and salvation. "Ziggy really sang, Screwed-up eyes and screwed-down hairdo, Like some cat from Japan, He could lick 'em by smiling, He could leave 'em to hang..." Oh, the challenges he would face in places like Texas.Can Ziggy save Earth or would be be forced to head back to Mars?

The amazing tale of a one-night stand that ends with our hero faking a violent home invasion and walking out with a bag of cash from New York Knicks legend, Anthony Mason. Talk about a New York story.

"Is this real life? Is this just fantasy? With an opening lyric like that and a rock-opera that name-drops Galileo, Scaramouche and Bishmillah, this film has all the makings of a Fellini film.

This could be a mob classic in the spirit of The Godfather and Goodfellas. The song opens with the line "Well they blew up the Chicken Man in Phily last night." And it goes on to tell the tale of a young guy and his girl trying to escape the hard life of the Southern New Jersey Boardwalk town. But our hero's need to earn a living and the pull of the gangsters to offer him great paychecks to be a hitman would make this a tension-filled tale.

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," as ol' Willie Shakespeare reminds us. And this 1995 classic would make for an interesting movie, I think. The story in the song is about a woman who is extremely angry with her ex-boyfriend. Seems he cheated on her and generally took her for granted. I could see this movie in two ways. A Fatal Attraction thriller. Or...in the hands of a Judd Apatow, I could see the extreme anger being turned into a crazy comedy.

I see a David and Goliath tale here pitting freedom-loving souls against an oppressive regime. The kids just want to rock, but the King wants to keep things 11th-Century muzzled. Oh, the high-jinx we could see from the rebels. And it can be escalated to an incredible scale as the song reminds us, "The King called up his jet fighters, He said you better earn your pay, Drop your bombs between the Minarets, Down the Casbah way."

You can't do this "song to movie" exercise without at least one Bob Dylan song. Tangled Up in Blue would make for an interesting heartfelt film about a tumultuous relationship that spans decades. What could be super-interesting is to tell the tale from the different perspectives as the song itself does. As Dylan writes and sings, "We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view."