"Has anybody encountered a dilemma with biopics that the more success that the person has, the harder it is to ... power. There's Evita, but that's a rise and fall and I only want the rise. Falling is such a downer."
If you're looking for stories like that you have to go to the "classic" biopics like "The Story of Louis Pasteur" and "Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet" Warner Brothers and other studios did a whole bunch of these inspirational historical biographies that were long on inspiration and short on history. "Cardinal Richelieu" was another one a biography that made the usually villainous Cardinal into the (admittedly wily) hero of the piece. Don't look for much history but it gives you the sense of how you take the raw material of history, throw most of it out and turn the rest into a very watchable story.
Inevitably, the nature of drama, irrespective of what story you're trying to tell, imposes a certain structure on everything and that structure is "opposition to adversity" and specifically, opposition to ever-growing adversity.
And we rather like the stories that involve triumph (if not ultimate triumph) over adversity.
But real life, unfortunately, doesn't often accomodate that structure. There are often struggles, but rarely do they fall neatly into a line of ever-growing struggles, with the most difficult one coming right at the "end" before a final triumph that sort of caps off your life.
That's why biographies often just tell the stories of short pieces of people's lives like maybe the kind of interesting parts that sort of make good stories and maybe that involves taking different parts of somebody's life and re-arranging them so as to jam all the good stuff into one neat, organized close-together segment.
Or just making a bunch of stuff up. That works too.
NMS