HBO announced this week that it will air the first authorized documentary about late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in 2015. Titled Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the film is the first biopic authorized by Cobain's family, and will even list Cobain's daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, as an executive producer. The film has been in the works for eight years, says director and producer Brett Morgen, who also noted that he was floored by the amount of material Cobain left behind. "Once I stepped into Kurts archive, I discovered over 200 hours of unreleased music and audio, a vast array of art projects (oil paintings, sculptures), countless hours of never-before-seen home movies, and over 4,000 pages of writings that together help paint an intimate portrait of an artist who rarely revealed himself to the media," Morgen said in a recent interview.
Little detail about the Cobain biopic was revealed in HBO's announcement, but Morgen revealed earlier this year that it would feature a mix of animation and live action. The film's title was borrowed from a musical collage created by Cobain on a 4-track recorder in 1988. The original recording combined snippets of sounds created by Cobain intermixed with old Nirvana demos and selections from Cobain's massive record collection. HBO did mention in its press release that the upcoming Cobain documentary will feature never-before-seen home movies, recordings, artwork and photography, plus material from his personal archives, family archives and songbooks. There will be dozens of Nirvana songs as well as previously unheard Cobain originals. Cobain took his own life in April, 1994.