In a piece titled “The Movie Camera Turns on John Lennon’s Murderer,” the December issue of the British music magazine Mojo acknowledges the truth of what I’ve been saying in this blog since January 2006: The title of the film Chapter 27, starring Jared Leto as Mark David Chapman, and Lindsay Lohan as Jude, a Lennon groupie, could only have come from “Chapter 27” of my Lennon biography Nowhere Man.Both Chapter 27 and another film about Chapman, The Killing of John Lennon, are, according to Mojo, scheduled for release in England on December 7, 2007, the day before the 27th anniversary of Lennon’s assassination.
Crediting Nowhere Man—“Rosen’s compelling account of Lennon’s lost Dakota years”—with being the first “extended extrapolation of the uncanny numerological connections” between Lennon and his killer, deputy editor Andrew Male writes: “Following a labyrinthine series of legal ding-dongs with the Lennon estate, the book finally emerged in 2000 complete with a coda, a ‘Chapter 27’ which connects the numerological meaning of 27—‘the triple 9,’ of profound importance to John Lennon—with Chapman’s belief that killing Lennon would allow him to disappear into the unwritten chapter of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.”
The article also notes that Chapter 27 does not fully explain its title; that an online petition group has been trying to pressure movie theaters not to show the film; and that The Killing of John Lennon, an independent film written, directed, and financed by Andrew Piddington and starring Jonas Ball as Chapman, is the superior movie.
(According to recent press reports, Chapter 27 is scheduled for theatrical release in the U.S. in March 2008, and Peace Arch Entertainment, the film’s producer, has just signed an agreement with Genius Products Inc. to distribute the DVD in North America.)
Finally, the Mojo article points out that the price of Nowhere Man in the U.K. is £9.99—a triple 9 that not even I ever noticed before.
