"DANNY COLLINS" THE FILM ABOUT A SINGER WHO DISCOVERS A LETTER WRITTEN TO HIM BY JOHN

The  letter that inspired the film, written by Lennon in 1971 and addressed to a singer and the journalist who had interviewed him.

In 1971, a British folk singer named Steve Tilston gave an interview to ZigZag — a small, underground-rock rag named for a Captain Beefheart jam and a popular brand of rolling papers — in support of his debut LP, a collection of earnest, fingerpicked guitar songs that recall Nick Drake and Jackson C. Frank. When asked if he thought fame and fortune might prove toxic to his songwriting, Mr. Tilston did not equivocate. “Yes, yes, of course it will,” he recalls saying. “My heart will suffer.”

John —then 30 and about to release “Imagine”—read Mr. Tilston’s interview, was stirred by his conviction and scribbled him a letter saying money didn’t change anything. Or not really. “So whadya think of that,” it ends.

Mr. Tilston was never able to answer. The note was sent to him care of ZigZag and lost for 34 years — perhaps nabbed at the time by an employee of the magazine who recognized its potential value to collectors. Mr. Tilston didn’t find out the correspondence even existed until 2005, when a man approached him to authenticate it, and Mr. Tilston slowly realized what had transpired. “I emailed him and said, ‘Look, you can have the letter, but I’d really like to know what it means, what it says,’ ” Mr. Tilston said. He described Lennon’s tone (only slightly wistfully) as “very brotherly.”

Now Mr. Tilston is mostly sanguine about its ramifications. “I’ve managed to earn my living as a musician for 40-odd years, and it’s been feast and famine,” he said. “But really, I’ve lived a charmed life. I wouldn’t change it at all.”

Mr. Tilston’s story is the loose inspiration for “Danny Collins,” a film opening March 20 written and directed by Dan Fogelman (whose screenplay credits include “Cars,” “Tangled” and “Crazy, Stupid, Love”) and starring Al Pacino as an over-tanned song-and-dance man — an amiable mix, Mr. Pacino said, of Barry Manilow and Rod Stewart, the kind of cheerfully aging superstar who plays sold-out theaters packed with swaying gray-haired fans.

After reading his story online, Mr. Fogelman reimagined Mr. Tilston’s tale as more cautionary: a songwriter so disillusioned by celebrity that he loses himself to it entirely. Decades later, when finally confronted with the letter (lost for 40 years, in the conceit of the film, not 34 as in real life), a jolting reminder of who he used to be, Danny Collins realizes he could have made different choices. “He had a certain look at the time, and a certain charm, and he could go there,” Mr. Pacino said. “He started putting them over, and his life went in that direction.” “When he gets the letter on his birthday, 40 years later, his life has run into a wall,” Mr. Pacino continued. “Countless years of dope and drugs and women and wives he can’t even remember. But this is why he’s receptive to it.”

That’s the particular optimism of “Danny Collins,” which insists that we all contain untold transformations, that any day could become an opportunity for reinvention. When Collins finally sees the letter — it’s a gift from his manager, played by Christopher Plummer — there is some serendipity in the timing. “He’s at a tipping point,” Mr. Fogelman said. “It’s almost perfect that he receives the letter when he does, although it’s gut-wrenching at first.”

Mr. Tilston, for his part, remains stoic, wryly amused by the entire episode. “The idea of celebrity turns me right off,” he said. “I just like to do what I do.”

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The Oscar winner also recalled once bumping into John Lennon in New York near Central Park.
"I ran into John Lennon but it wasn't a run in, we were like ships in the night, we passed each other but he looked at me and smiled and I smiled back and we both waved. It was a moment that I'll never forget," he said.
The film opens in the United Kingdom on May 29.