Experience Hendrix “has made it known many times in the past that no such film, were it to include original music or copyrights created by Jimi Hendrix, can be undertaken without its full participation,” the company said in a statement.

The move will come as no shock to the makers of “All Is By My Side,” reportedly about to begin product in Ireland. The film covers the period in which Hendrix emerged in London and went on to stun the world with the debut album “Are You Experienced.”

Benjamin, of course, is a famous musician as well, being half of the progressive group Outkast. The film’s writer-director is John Ridley (“Three Kings”). IMDB does not list the film on either man’s credits/projects page, however.

The production company is Richard Kelly’s Darko Entertainment, working with Subotica Entertaiment and Matador Pictures, the Hollywood Reporter said in confirming the Hendrix film plans.

The lack of actual Hendrix recordings no doubt could be circumvented by use of covers, which Hendrix recorded throughout his career. The best known is Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” The movie would not need the estate’s permission. This technique was used successfully in a few Beatles-related projects, notably “Backbeat.”

Despite the continuing fascination with the psychedelic guitarist’s life and work, no biopic of consequence has survived pre-production. Showtime did a cable film in 2000 with Wood Harris (“The Wire”) and Billy Zane.

The Hendix estate said it “had not ruled out a biopic in the future.”

“Producing partners would, out of necessity, have to involve the company from the inception of any such film project if it is to include original Jimi Hendrix music or compositions,” the statement released to Billboard said.

Hendrix’s name, music and image were heavily exploited in the years following his death. The family eventually sorted out its internal disputes and took control of the legacy. It has closely guarded all things Hendrix.

Adding to the mountain of Dead software that’s been released in the past 12 months, we have on the horizon the 14-DVD box set “All The Years Combine: The DVD Collection” from Shout! Factory.

The Dead box set drops April 17, just in time for workingman Dead fans to tap their tax refund checks for the $100.

Shout! as you may recall rereleased “The Grateful Dead Movie” in high definition Nov. 1. The movie (this time in standard def) anchors the upcoming DVD box set.

Second billed is “The Closing of Winterland,” a lengthy and well-regard Dead-only film that Rhino originally released to DVD in 2003. The double-DVD has about four hours of footage from the last night of Winterland on New Years Eve 1978.

Then there’s “Dead Ahead,” another existing DVD, with three hours of footage from Radio City Music Hall in October 1980. (The Shout! box retains the extra hour of bonus footage from the 2005 Monterey Video DVD.)

Making its DVD debut is “So Far,” a highly regarded title last seen on VHS in 1991 (Arista). Jerry Garcia gets a co-directing credit on this experimental 1987 movie, which highlights the Dead drummers and a swarm of trippy computer graphics. “We were after the idea of electronic mind-altering and consciousness-altering,” Garcia wrote of the hourlong film. “And on that level, I think it’s pretty successful.”

Other DVDs in the Shout! set include “Ticket to New Years” (Oakland, 1987), “Truckin’ Up to Buffalo” (1989), “Downhill From Here” (Wisconsin, 1989) and the four “View From The Vault” titles.

A bonus disc features Justin Kreutzmann’s video “Backstage Pass” (1992), an interview with archivist David Lemieux and a handful of bonus Dead performances.

Shout! also is selling “The Grateful Dead Bundle,” which throws in the fall 2011 “The Grateful Dead Movie” on Blu-ray for another $8.

A 40-page booklet includes liner notes by Deadhead journalist Blair Jackson, who wrote the book “Garcia: An American Life.”

The project is billed as “in collaboration with Rhino,” reconnecting the original Rhino people at Shout! with their old label, long owned by WEA.

More Dead content:
Grateful Dead exhibit at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Jerry Garcia documentary feature film
Dead brings to life Dave’s Pick CD series

Update: The filmmakers are “currently in talks” with several distributors, a spokeswoman for the project told PsychedelicSight.com. “Jerry: The Movie” is aiming for a spring 2012 release.

The 42,000 in attendance at the San Francisco Giants’ Jerry Garcia Day last summer got a sneak peek of the docu while filmmakers were busy shooting more footage. Behind the camera that day was Justin Kreutzmann, the son of Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, who’s listed as a co-producer on the documentary.

The film’s based on three hours of conversation Leo shared with Garcia in 1987, a decade before the Grateful Dead guitarist’s death.

“The historic interview was shot on negative film with studio quality sound and lighting,” the producers said in a release, noting that they had secured rights.

The Garcia movie web site refers to it as “Jerry: The Movie,” but that could well be a working title since no name is identified in the press materials.

The filmmakers promise unseen concert footage and “rare home movies.”

Another Garcia movie, “Dark Star,” was announced in 2010 and is marked on imdb for a 2012 release. It’s a biopic about Garcia’s younger years, based on the book “Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia.”

For the documentary, Leo’s producing partner is John Hartmann, described as the former manager of Peter, Paul & Mary, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Eagles and Poco. Hartmann apparently is the brother of the late comedian Phil Hartmann.

Leo’s credits include the films “This Is Elvis” and “The Beach Boys: An American Band.” For TV he presentations include “Crosby, Stills & Nash: Long Time Comin,’” “Red Hot & Blue” and “Rolling Stone: 20 Years of Rock ‘n Roll.”

Bill Kreutzmann’s credits include the short film “Backstage Pass,” a documentary, as well as a pair of videos connected to the Who.

The Pranksters, of course, were the pack of bohemian youth who gathered around the hipster novelist Kesey. With beat generation icon Neal Cassady behind the wheel of an old school bus, they traveled across the country, in search of the New York World’s Fair and … Whatever.

The bus, carrying the destination sign of “Furthur,” was painted wildly, in tune with the soon-to-come psychedelic aesthetic. One Prankster called it a “traveling pleasure palace.”

Many historians point to this happening as the big bang that unleashed the psychedelic era. Kesey (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) had taken part in government-sponsored LSD experiments five years earlier and was eager to spread the sparkly swirling vibes.

“We were too old to be beatniks and a little too young to be hippies,” one Prankster recalled.

And so, a half-century later, documentary filmmakers Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side”) and Alison Ellwood found themselves with 40 hours of amateur home movies shot on the trip.

The resulting two-hour movie from Magnolia Pictures began its theatrical roll-out Aug. 5 in San Francisco (naturally) and New York. “Magic Trip” downloads also are available (iTunes link).

Reviews were mixed: The San Francisco Examiner reviewer found that while ” ‘Magic Trip’ failed “to adequately explore the significance of the journey involved, the film is a worthy document of the 1964 event and a loopily enjoyable visit to the inception of hippiedom.”

The New York Times’ Stephen Holden wrote that “the unbridgeable distance between the stoned and the sober is the problem with Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s documentary.” As in, taking acid is a lot involving than watching some shave-tail kid freak out.

The footage couldn’t be synched up with what remained of the recorded sound, so most of the movie’s audio focuses on the participants’ memories. Audio interviews with various Pranksters were made in the 1970s. “None of the storytellers could be described as transfixing yarn spinners,” Holden wrote. “Any philosophical afterthoughts are resoundingly banal.”

The Hollywood Reporter, however, found the older Pranksters’ tales fascinating: “They provide a vivid portrait of the journey previously profiled in Tom Wolfe’s book ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,’ ” reviewer Frank Scheck wrote.

He continued: “Much of the footage on display consists of the Pranksters behaving in generally silly, stoned, sloppy fashion, with the result that the proceedings come to resemble a rambling home movie that was clearly more fun to make than it is to watch.”

The band that would become the Grateful Dead, the Warlocks, make an appearance and, of course, “Truckin’” keys the soundtrack. The main Dead offshoot band is now called Furthur.

You can see for yourself via Magnolia’s on-demand (paid) distribution network, which includes iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, the DirecTV and Dish satellite systems and a swarm of cable providers.

In London, ex-Pink Floyd members David Gilmour and Nick Mason joined Waters onstage May 12. Gilmour played on “Comfortably Numb,” and Mason came onstage for the closing song “Outside the Wall.”

On the recording front, Sony has in the works an eight-disc Waters solo box set.

The sudden addition of the July 8 show at the Olympic Sports Complex caused Waters to move up several concerts set for early July in Milan, Italy.

“The Wall” filming first spools up for Waters’ May 11-18 shows at the the O2 in London (another Olympics host facility).

For both of these recorded events, management is telling fans to leave their cameras, recorders and smartphones at home, fearing the effects of flashes from the crowd on the filming and the screen projections.

In April, Waters’ show inspired some new controversy in Holland via the part of the “Wall” concert in which he points a fake machine gun at the audience. Earlier on the day of the first show, a gunman opened fire with a machine gun at a Dutch mall, killing six. The fan site pinkfloydz.com reports that local media tagged Waters’ use of the gun as “shameful” and “insensitive.”

In other news, Sony is releasing Roger Waters’ “The Album Collection” as an eight-disc box set. This is a Europe-only product, but online retailers already are taking preorders for the imported set at $48. Sony pushed back an April release date in Europe to May 30. In the States, “The Album Collection” surfaces June 7.

The box set contains the solo albums “The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking” (1984), “Radio Kaos” (1987), “Amused to Death” (1992), “In The Flesh” (2000) and “Ca Ira” (2005). There’s also a DVD of a 2000 performance of “In the Flesh.” Online retailers list the DVD as PAL/Region 0, which is tech talk for it’ll work in your player, wherever you are.

Now it’s “one final night,” with screenings at 7:30 p.m. local time on the 5th. The distributor/promoters are Fathom and Rhino Entertainment. The Dead movie is being redistributed to cinemas via Fathom Entertainment’s digital cinema network.

Of the 540 screens used in April, 108 are back in action.

Check out the lineup of “Grateful Dead Movie” cinemas. Organizers say that not all ticket arrangements have been finalized, so check back if they’re not available for your local bijou.

Other than the April 20 screening, “The Grateful Dead Movie” has not seen in mainstream cinemas since 1977.

The film offers a mix of performance, documentary footage and animation. It was filmed at Winterland Arena in 1974, during what was to be the Dead’s farewell appearances. The two screenings in 2010 advertised “exclusive” interviews with Jerry Garcia as well.

Tickets went on sale March 18 for the April 20 screenings. The Dead movie is being distributed to cinemas via Fathom Entertainment’s digital cinema network.

The movie offers a mix of performance, documentary footage and what was cutting-edge animation for the time. It was filmed and recorded at San Francisco’s Winterland Arena in 1974, during what was supposed to be the Grateful Dead’s farewell concert stand. The Deadhead phenomenon receives almost as much attention as the band, with plenty of footage of fans — some cool, some annoying.

“The Grateful Dead Movie” has been released several times on home video and its five-CD “soundtrack” offers a sonic experience far beyond that offered by the film.

The album “Steal Your Face” covers the same event, but was disowned by the Dead as focusing too much on songs and not jams. Famed soundman Owsley “Bear” Stanley dismissed the double album even though his legendary Wall of Sound audio system was used during the stand. Critic Lester Bangs called the album “Steal Your Money.”

Regardless, the movie was directed by Jerry Garcia and comes from the early ’70s, an era widely considered to be the Dead’s best. The band included Keith Godchaux and Donna Godchaux. Songs in the movie span the Dead catalog up until that time, stretching from to “Morning Dew“ to “Eyes of the World.”

Deadhead favorites include “Playing in the Band,” “One More Saturday Night,” “Casey Jones,” “Stella Blue” and “Sugar Magnolia.”

Here’s Gary Gutierrez’ animated segment for “U.S. Blues”: (text continues)

Organizers say a bonus feature at “The Grateful Dead Movie” screenings will be an “exclusive” unseen interview with Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia conducted while he was directing the project 35 years ago. (The DVD has an extensive lineup of extras.)

Rhino Entertainment, which handles the Dead’s CD and download releases for Warner, is the co-presenter.

View the list of cinemas showing “The Grateful Dead Movie.”

The indie film features music by the Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones. The Dead’s Bob Weir is in Park City, Utah, for a solo gig promoting the indie picture.

Roadside Attractions snapped up U.S. distribution rights to “The Music Never Stopped,” in one of the Sundance fest’s biggest and earliest deals. The movie was the featured film at the Salt Lake City Gala, one of Sundance’s big opening events.

Director Jim Kohlberg’s debut film is based on author-neurologist Oliver Sacks’s case study “The Last Hippie” (printed in An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales in 1995). Sacks remains best known for the tales “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”

The story goes something like this: The son (Lou Taylor Pucci), can’t remember much of anything, but he responds to music by the top rock and psychedelic music artists of back in the day. Two decades earlier, the young man ran away from home in part because his father hated his counterculture music. Now, in the 1990s, he’s in a hospital with cerebral trauma that leaves him stuck in the ’60s.

The dad (J.K. Simmons) tosses off his loathing of hippie music with the help of a music therapist. He shares the tunes with his broken son and there is peace, of a sort. The movie’s tag line is “No matter how lost you are, music can bring you Home.”

“I always connected deeply to the story and the redemptive qualities of the characters and the iconic music,” director Kohlberg says. The production company takes its name from a Byrds song: “Mr. Tamborine Man.”

“By far, getting the music was the hardest part of the production and I never really thought we would get it done,” Kohlberg told the Wall Street Journal. “I really didn’t. I was amazed I had overcome my self-imposed hurdle.”

The movie has three songs from Dylan, four from the Grateful Dead, two from the Beatles and three from Buffalo Springfield. The director says getting the Dead and Dylan on board was huge, considering the budget.

Sue Jacobs (“Things We Lost in the Fire”) worked as music producer/supervisor.

“You can’t beat the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills & Nash music in this film,” Roadside co-president Howard Cohen said.

One critic isn’t so sure. Matt Goldberg, writing on Collider.com, calls the use of classic rock lazy. “In my experience, people who love music are far more aware of deeper cuts and less-popular bands,” Goldberg wrote in a review. “I don’t have a problem with (the son) loving the Beatles or the Grateful Dead as much as I mind that the songs he connects to are “All You Need Is Love” and “Truckin”. … A music aficionado like (the son) should be more into obscure stuff.”

Actor Lou Taylor Pucci’s father is a rock guitarist from New Jersey.

The movie’s title comes from a Dead song co-written by Weir. A 1995 CD of songs by artists that influenced the Grateful Dead also borrowed the title.

That curious and notorious 1968 movie returns this fall, with a new Blu-ray and a CD box set celebrating the group’s lone venture into filmmaking and psychedelia.

Asked today why “Head” retains a cult status four decades later, drummer Micky Dolenz says with a grin: “There’s no accounting for taste”

The movie, a non-linear bomb, was directed by Bob Rafelson, who went on to make “Five Easy Pieces” and “The King of Marvin Gardens” with another “Head” collaborator, Jack Nicholson.

Freed of NBC and the demands of weekly pop stardom, the band fell in with the psychedelic vibe of 1968.

Early on in the movie, the band sing-songs, “Hey, hey we are the Monkees/you know we love to please/our manufactured image/with no philosophy” — dumping on the TV theme song that introduced the fresh young actors to the nation only two years before.

The Criterion Collection will include “Head” on its Nov. 23 release of “America Lost and Found: The BBS Story” box set, along with the Rafelson films above and “Easy Rider.” (The BBS refers to Rafelson and his partners Bert Schneider and Steve Blauner. Rafelson and Schneider created the Monkees.)

Meanwhile, Rhino Handmade, the specialty unit of the Rhino WEA label, resurrects the soundtrack of “Head” with a three-disc boxed set due in late October. (text continues below)

Originally six Monkee songs and a batch of sonic clips (“I’d like a glass of cold gravy with a hair in it, please.”), the new version of the soundtrack packs in 21 previously unreleased tracks, outtakes, rarities, and live performances. There’s also a live set from the spring of 1968 and a contemporary radio interview with singer Davy Jones.

While the movie proved plenty strange, predictably the original six “Head” songs were in line with the relatively tame psychedelic songs that were finding a mainstream audience in ’68.

They were “Porpoise Song,” the movie theme written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King; Michael Nesmith’s hard rocker “Circle Sky”; Peter Tork’s “Can You Dig It”; Harry Nilsson’s “Daddy’s Song,” performed by David Jones; and “As We Go Along,” a track penned by Carole King and Toni Stern, and sung by Micky Dolenz.

The Monkees started playing their own instruments on 1967′s album “Headquarters,” to some fanfare and confusion. For “Head,” they continued to play, supported by artists such as Ry Cooder, Leon Russell, Neil Young, Jack Nitzsche, Danny Kortchmar and Dewey Martin.

None of the “Head” songs found a radio audience, but taken as a whole they hold up well in the new century. Monkees haters could find their minds expanded by this set — or at least its original six tracks.

The “Head” movie last was released on DVD in 1998. Rhino produced via its theatrical unit, still riding the success of its wholesale release of the Monkees catalog four years earlier. A few years back, Rhino created collectors editions of the Monkees’ first four albums, “Head” not among them until now.

Dolenz, in a promotional interview for the new releases explains “Head” as “a deconstruction not only of the Monkees but how people perceived them.” Helpfully, he points out that the bit where the Monkees play dandruff in the hair of actor Victor Mature is “obviously very metaphorical, about the new generation.”

The actor speaks of the Monkees in the same breath with the Beatles and Dylan, adding to the surrealism.

Among the guests in “Head” were Frank Zappa, who wrangles a cow, and boxer Sonny Liston.

We can neither confirm nor deny reports that any sequel to the movie was to be promoted as “from the producers who gave you ‘Head.’ ”

(If you order the BBS Blu-ray set from Criterion, use the promo code rhino.)

Expected to be titled “Dark Star,” the movie “will be psychedelic in the best sense,” one writer says.

The independent film’s director is Amir Bar-Lev, who made the excellent 2007 documentary “My Kids Could Paint That” as well as 2010′s “Tillman.” While a stream of documentaries have covered Garcia and the Grateful Dead over the years, this is a feature film.

The source material is Robert Greenfield’s book “Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia”. (The guitarist died in 1995.) Greenfield told Rolling Stone’s web site that the biopic would use period music, but since the film ends when the Grateful Dead begins, it’s unlikely the jam band’s songs would be heard.

(Update 8/4: Unlikely seems an understatement. Grateful Dead Productions and Jerry Garcia Family LLC made a point of announcing that the “supposed upcoming” biopic won’t be allowed to use recordings by the Grateful Dead or from Jerry Garcia’s solo work. Access to Garcia family members will be denied as well, the Dead organizations said.) /update

Greenfield compared the project with the acclaimed Beatles movie “Backbeat,” which told the story of the Fab Four (or Five) before they became famous. “(Garcia) did things on electric guitar that weren’t done before not because he had taken LSD but because of all the influences he absorbed throughout his life.”

The Garcia project’s screenwriter is Topper Lilien, whose previous movies “Where the Money Is” and “Dungeons & Dragons” were released in 2000. “Topper Lilien’s daring script does justice to Garcia and steadfastly resists cliche,” Bar-Lev told Variety, which broke the story.

Producing are Eric Eisner (“Hamlet 2″) and the indie team of Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa (“Little Miss Sunshine”).

Hollywood trades often float early-in-development projects in exchange for exclusivity. The Garcia biopic has no star or distributor, apparently, so there’s no guarantee it’ll come out soon — or at all.

The news comes days after Amy Adams (“Enchanted”) was announced as the star of a Janis Joplin biopic called “Get It While You Can.” “City of God’s” Fernando Meirelles directs and “Twilight’s” Wyck Godfrey produces.

“Nowhere Boy,” a U.K. import about John Lennon’s childhood, is making the festival circuit before its October release in the States.

More Grateful Dead content:

• Grateful Dead’s history a Society affair
• Furthur adventures of the Grateful Dead family
• Furthur live on satellite radio; concert cancelled