Beyond the Sea (film) intended to produce and direct a biopic based on the life of Bobby Darin with funding from his own production company, Baltimore Pictures. With writer Lewis Colick, Levinson pitched the idea to Warner Bros. Pictures, who agreed to co-finance "The Bobby Darin Story" and cover distribution duties. Producer Arthur Friedman, a fan of Darin's work, began to laboriously negotiate for crucial music licensing rights with Darin's ex-wife, Sandra Dee; his son, Dodd; and former manager Steve Blauner. Colick wrote the first draft in 1987 before Warner Bros. and Levinson commissioned rewrites from Paul Attanasio and Paul Schrader. Their scripts, which
Beyond the Sea (film) "The Shipping News", was hired to write a new draft for "Beyond the Sea". Epperson's script included Darin's penchant for orgies after his divorce with Sandra Dee. Spacey, finding the Epperson script to be overtly dark and morbid, began to rewrite "Beyond the Sea", incorporating info from the 1987 Lewis Colick script. Spacey acknowledged he portrayed Darin in an exaggeratedly sympathetic way, and decided not to centrally depict the darker side of Darin's life. "The other scripts made Bobby [Darin] a rather unlikable figure," he explained. "I was not interested in making a conventional biopic, as you can see from