It was first announced around eighteen months ago, but the needle now seems to be firmly in the groove for Spinning Gold. The biopic of famous music exec Neil Bogart will star Justin Timberlake, with studio Foresight backing the project. RCA are also aboard to deal with the soundtrack.
The gold in the title refers to the classic pop choons of the 1970s, while the spinning refers to "records", which older readers will recall as a medium in which people bought and played music in the days before you could steal buy it from the internet.
Neil Bogart was the famous American record executive behind KISS, T. Rex, Donna Summer and The Village People, and was widely credited with the rise of bubblegum pop. He was no relation to Humphrey (his real name was Bogatz) but named the label he founded Casablanca because hey, why not? He worked in tandem with Peter Guber, who went on to become the heavyweight Hollywood producer behind the likes of Rain Man and Tim Burton's Batman.
Bogart was the loose basis for the character of Steve Waits, played by Paul Sand in 1980's Can't Stop the Music. He succumbed to cancer in 1982, at the horribly young age of 39. His sons Timothy Scott Bogart and Evan "Kidd" Bogart (himself a successful songwriter) recently founded Boardwalk Entertainment, and Spinning Gold will be one of its first projects. The film's thrust is apparently a rags-to-riches story of a poor New York kid who grew up to become a multimillionaire and part-define a musical era.
“Spinning Gold is a saga about a young dreamer who started with nothing and came of age in the 60s and 70s, believing anything was possible and every risk was worth taking,” says Timothy Bogart. ”The main issue has been finding an actor who would embody Bogart. When Justin walked into the room, that was the moment I had been waiting for!”
Timberlake will also produce, along with the Bogarts, Gary Randall, and Foresight's Mark Damon. The "indie movie with a major studio-sized budget" is now expected to go into production early next year, and will be looking for deals at Cannes later this month.
We'll next see Timberlake alongside Ben Affleck and Gemma Arterton in the thriller Runner Runner, which is out in the UK in September.