Grabbing a piece of her heart.

Janis Joplin never thought much of herself when she was alive. She didn't think she pretty, never experienced a stable love relationship, and she turned her blues singing and fondness for booze and drugs into therapy--a remedy to blunt the sadness in her heart.

No one, then, would be more surprised than Joplin herself to know that today, nearly 28 years after she died of a heroin overdose in a Hollywood motel, she's the subject of two musical biopics that are racing to beat each other to the screen.

The more publicized of the two, under development at Lakeshore Entertainment, was originally to star Melissa Etheridge. That project is on hold today as Etheridge cuts her sixth album for Island Records and prepares for the second child that her partner, filmmaker Julie Cypher, is expecting in November.

"Melissa will be in the studio for the next couple of months," says John Vlautin, senior vice president for media relations at Island Records, "She'll be busy with the album until the end of the year." It will be out in January, he adds, and Etheridge will launch a concert tour next spring. Given that schedule, Vlautin says, "I'd think the Janis thing would be off in the near or not-so-near future."

The other Joplin film would star the gifted Lili Taylor (I Shot Andy Warhol) and be directed and cowritten by Nancy Savoca, who guided Taylor through the fondly remembered Dogfight. Originally on TriStar's production slate, the film is now being produced independently.

"Whoever gets into production first will win," says Rich Guay, Savoca's husband and coproducer. "Things are looking very positive in terms of getting the financing together. I don't know if it'll be ready in the fall but certainly the beginning of the year."

Guay says that Savoca and her cowriter, novelist Francine Prose, have done a tremendous amount of research, including interviews with Joplin's male and female lovers. According to Guay, Savoca's film will include lesbian love scenes: "I don't know how explicit they're going to be, but they're definitely going to be there. This isn't sanitized by any means."

Although their film would have a smaller budget than the Lakeshore project, Guay says, "we're the authorized version. We're working with the family and with Big Brother and the Holding Company [the San Francisco acid-rock band with which Joplin sang], and we have rights to use Janis's master recordings."

Lakeshore Entertainment CEO Tom Rosenberg says his company also has nonexclusive rights to several songs and exclusive rights to the Joplin classic "Piece of My Heart." Even with Etheridge's questionable participation, Rosenberg says the Joplin film hasn't been shelved.

"Melissa might come back," Rosenberg says. "She had this scheduling conflict she had told us about. We weren't able to start filming before that, [but] she indicated to us that when she's done with the concert tour, she wants to think it over again."