Motley Crue’s ‘Dirt’ To Begin Filming Next Year
Motley Crue’s ‘Dirt’ To Begin Filming Next Year
November 4, 2013
‘Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa’ director Jeff Tremaine will next helm ‘Dirt’, a feature film that tells the decadent coming-of-age story of 1980s rock band Motley Crue, reports Deadline.com.
The film is based on the band’s bestselling autobiography ‘The Dirt: Confessions Of The World’s Most Notorious Rock Band’. The members of the band — Vince Neil, Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee and Mick Mars — wrote the book with Neil Strauss. The logline? Big hair, big sound, big money, big brawls, scandals and debauchery, and the inevitable big problems caused by drugs, drink, and living and breathing the rock-and-roll lifestyle as the quartet rose from playing local clubs on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip to touring the world as global rock stars.
The film will be produced by LBI Entertainment’s Rick Yorn and Julie Yorn, along with 10th Street Entertainment and Erik Olsen. Amanda Adelson is co-producing. ‘Californication’ scribe Tom Kapinos is polishing the script, and the film is being set up independently by CAA to shoot early next year, with the agency repping domestic distribution rights.
As Tremaine has been taking progressive steps as a filmmaker, chronicling a decadent traveling pack seemed the right place to make a real narrative that has its share of drama, and isn’t reliant on staged stunts.
“I’ve been careful to make this a natural progression,” Tremain said. “I’ve been offered a lot of scripts but Dirt is something I pursued with everything I had. I’ve wanted to make this going back to 2001, when we were just planning the first Jackass movie and I found out that David Gale at MTV Films had just optioned the book. First of all, I had no idea how to make Jackass into a movie, but I said to him, let me direct that movie, too. He said, yeah, of course! He was being sarcastic, because he had the same level of confidence in me as a director as I did at that time. Luckily for me, the movie never got made, and when this project became available, I put everything I had into chasing it and convincing everyone that I am the right guy for it. I really feel I am.”
When first published, ‘Dirt’ was almost a how-to guide for misbehavior for Tremaine, Knoxville and the other Jackass guys when they started to get famous and were living as outrageously off-camera as onscreen.
“We were deep into doing Jackass on TV and about to start doing Jackass: The Movie and we were all passing the book around and going, holy shit,” Tremaine recalled. “We thought we were being crazy on the road. You read about these guys and it was like 10 times worse, though I think we’d done stuff that stands up to anybody else. I connected with that book on so many levels. From a band of brothers that gets ripped apart and then pulls back together, or being part of a group that is expected to behave badly, and what happens to you when that becomes your expectation. What happens when everybody encourages you and gives you money to be the worst behaved you can be? You can do no wrong, and the worse you do, the more you’re celebrated. It is a story that is somehow familiar to me.”
While the decadence probably makes those days a blur for Motley Crue, they worked for years to get the property back from Paramount, which had several drafts of a script Rich Wilkes wrote when David Fincher was aboard to direct. The band managed to keep hold of the rights to all of their songs and publishing. Clearly, somebody was sober. This will allow Tremaine full use of the band’s songs and lyrics. Whether they use the band’s recordings or find actors to replicate the Vince Neil vocals, that will depend on a casting process just getting underway.
“It’s the spirit we’ve got to get right,” Tremaine said. “It’s important to get actors who play, or who understand how to deliver the charisma it takes to be onstage. Rock stars have a swagger. Some of what they went through is funny, but overall this movie is not going to be a comedy. It’s pretty dark. I think fans of what I’ve done will like this movie, but it’s not going to make you fall out of your chair laughing.”
Courtesy of www.sleazeroxx.com