Beyond the Sea (film) portray Bobby Darin, but the filmmakers believed the actor was too old. Around this time, Spacey coincidentally performed the cover version of Darin's "That Old Black Magic" for the soundtrack of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil". The actor explained that after 1994, "at least three times a year, my manager would call over to Warner Bros. and say, 'Hey, what's happening with that Bobby Darin movie? You guys ever going to make it?'" With filming to originally begin in late 1997, pre-production for "Dreamer" was commencing, and Levinson began to discuss the film with various actors. This
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