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Editor-director John Ottman will direct Billy & Me, an unauthorized Billy Joel biopic centered on the singer’s pre-Piano Man years and his first manager.
John Ottman, an editor and director whose most recent credit was lead editor on the Michael Jackson biopic Michael, is set to direct Billy & Me, a feature about Billy Joel‘s formative years. Joel himself, by all available indication, did not sign off on it.
The film opens before fame: before the hits, before the 1973 album and song that gave him a permanent identity as the Piano Man. It centers on Irwin Mazur, the manager who signed Joel in 1970 and ran his career up to his 1972 deal with Columbia Records. Mazur sold the production his exclusive life rights.
So did Jon Small, Joel’s drummer in their early band the Hassles and his bandmate in the short-lived 1970 acid-rock duo Attila. Small comes on as consultant, co-executive producer and second unit director.
The catch is that Joel did not authorize the project. A representative for the singer, asked by Variety to comment on the biopic ahead of production, did not immediately respond. The film is moving forward on the rights it does have, those of the people standing next to Joel in 1970, rather than Joel’s own.
Adam Ripp wrote the script and will produce under his ArtPhyl Pictures banner. Casting is underway. Production is slated for this fall in Winnipeg and New York.
Ottman, in announcement materials, said he was drawn to the script’s humanity and to the period detail of long hair and cigarette smoke. Small, in a written statement, called it the most honest and authentic portrayal of Joel’s early life he had read, and emphasized that he met Joel when the singer was 16.
Attila, the 1970 album Small and Joel cut together, is a famously strange entry in the Joel discography. The singer himself has described the record as psychedelic bullshit in interviews. How much of it surfaces in Billy & Me, and in what form, is not yet clear.
The Mazur frame also brushes up against a complicated stretch of biography that the recent HBO documentary leaned into. Joel’s first wife, Elizabeth Weber, was previously married to Small and left him for Joel, breaking up Attila and contributing to a period the singer has described as a deep depression with two suicide attempts. Whether the film engages that material is not addressed in the announcement.
This is the second major Billy Joel project in the past 18 months. The two-part HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes premiered at Tribeca in June 2025 and aired in July to a 95% Rotten Tomatoes score. Joel skipped the premiere after being diagnosed the week before with Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus, the brain condition that has also forced him to cancel tour dates.
Financing for Billy & Me is being assembled by Jay Cohen, formerly of the Gersh Agency, who is also handling domestic distribution. Mitchell Leib, the longtime Disney music chief, is on as executive music producer.
Ottman is repped by Gersh, Ripp by Underground. The next question is who plays the 16-year-old Joel who, in the film’s framing, didn’t yet believe in himself.
