Somebody is trying to put together a stage musical version of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nicolas Roeg's 1976 science fiction classic, and park it on Broadway, and it has been reported in the British press that David Bowie, who starred in the movie, is working on the project with director Peter Schaufuss, with an eye towards lending him the rights to some of his songs. Now David Bowie has announced that it's news to him. An official notice posted on Bowie's website quotes a "spokesman" as saying, "We have licensed absolutely no material written by Mr. Bowie to Schaufuss. We have never been requested to and we do not intend to," adding, "We are close to the Walter Tevis Estate and we have and have first hand knowledge that they have not licensed the musical rights to The Man Who Fell To Earth to Schaufuss either." (Tevis wrote the novel on which Roeg's movie was based. He's one of those lucky writers whose names have been kept alive thanks mostly to the movies' versions of his work: he also wrote the novel The Hustler and its sequel, The Color of Money, which lent its title, but not much else, to the screenplay that Richard Price eventually wrote for the sequel to the movie version of The Hustler.)

The Bowie website also claims that "the advertising for this production appears to be utilising an unauthorised name and likeness of Mr. Bowie and we will seek injunctions, if necessary, to stop their use." Bowie himself characterized reports of his participation as "absolute toss"--when Bowie denied rumors that he was going to appear in an episode of Doctor Who, he called them, "absolute tish and tosh"; this didn't even merit the extra noun--and added, "I have no idea who Peter Schaufuss is either." (Anyone who's followed Bowie's career at all will recognize that for him to say he's never heard of someone is no small thing.) It goes without saying that anyone trying to hatch a spin-off of The Man Who Fell to Earth would want very much to at least give the impression of having Bowie's blessing, at the very least. The film, which launched Bowie as a movie actor, cast him as an extraterrestrial on a mission to Earth to save his distant, dying planet; for this purpose, he takes out patents on various advanced alien technologies and assumes the persona of an eccentric genius gazillionaire. When the movie first came out, one reviewer wrote that it was as likely an explanation of Howard Hughes as any other.) It was a role that Bowie had unknowingly been auditioning for in some of his early seventies records and stage shows, and though he contributed no songs to the film either, he subsequently used stills from it as cover art for two of his albums. (Incidentally, the BBC claims that it's not clear that the production touted in the link above and the one that Schaufuss is working on are one and the same, but we'd hate to think that two people had this same idea.)