Weird Al to Star in All-Polka Bowie Bio-Pic

Recording artist Al Yankovic has announced official plans to write, direct, and star in an all-Polka biopic of David Bowie, a first-of-its-kind joint production of Amazon, Netflix, and Disney. Yankovic, known professionally as “Weird Al,” had long expressed an interest in parodying a Bowie song, but due to his policy of not parodying artists who have passed away, Bowie inconveniently died before he ever got around to it. For that reason, Yankovic began working on a Polka arrangement of “Station to Station” without any planned lyrical alterations when he got carried away and recorded four albums’ worth of material with nothing but his voice and accordion.

“Once I nailed ‘The Bewlay Brothers,’ I knew this was bigger than an album—I had to do a Bowie biopic,” said Yankovic in a statement released earlier today.

The project is tentatively slated to be titled The Gospel Accordion to David Bowie. Yankovic explained of Bowie’s 1967 deep cut on which the movie title is based, “I know, ‘The Gospel According to Tony Day’ is a bit of an obscure reference, but it’s the only Bowie song with ‘according to’ in its title.”

Previously, Yankovic mentioned in a 2016 interview that he had never met David Bowie and was unsure how Bowie would have felt about a parody. Yankovic stated, “I have no idea how he’d even feel about a parody, but he seems like a really cool guy and I would assume he has a great sense of humor.” He also emphasized that he doesn’t consider any artist beyond having fun poked at them, saying, “I don’t think that anybody is beyond having a little fun poked at them. I don’t think anyone is sacred, and everybody should be able to take a joke.”*

But the current project is anything but a joke. “Polka is the highest form of musical genre,” said Yankovic. “I’m not parodying Bowie. I’m not even paying homage. What I’m doing is elevating his work.”

Yankovic went on to explain that he will personally portray Bowie in the film, while Andy Serkis has agreed to perform motion-capture for a CGI version of Mick Ronson, and Tom Hanks has agreed to reprise his role as Col. Tom Parker from the 2022 movie Elvis, for a planned dream sequence. Though filming has yet to begin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos issued a concurrent statement calling the project, “The Movie Event of the Year.”

The Gospel Accordion to David Bowie is slated for release one year from today. On April 1st… if you didn’t pick up on that by now…

—
* This paragraph is 100% true.