It appears that Zooey Deschanel may not be getting to play Janis Joplin in Gospel According to Janis after all as she announces that the project is on hold due to the difficulties of gathering some rights.

Speaking in an interview she throws up the fact that they don't have all the rights gathered together to tell her story, never mind the money. Now to me these are perhaps two of the largest factors in the making of a film about someone's life.

"I don't know when we're going to start shooting. We were supposed to shoot in November, but it's one of these things [that] seems like it's been hard to get all the money and the rights in place...There are all kinds of different rights. You need the rights to the song, and life rights. There's a lot of legal stuff that goes into playing a real person."

The interview is over at VH1 through Cinematical.

She does go on to say that although the film is looking at the day of her death and that there aren't many flashbacks, the story will be a positive one looking at her vitality and it will be quite uplifting. Okay, that seems really strange to me. Didn't she die after overdosing on whiskey and heroin? How uplifting can the last day of her life really be without reflective flashbacks?

Perhaps there is some way to tell it, but without money or the necessary rights it will never get told.