We all remember the long-gestating Mötley Crüe biopic, “The Dirt,” that’s been in development for over six years. Last we heard the Crüe themselves were pissed at MTV Films for having never gotten the film off the ground and wanted to take back project and shop it around to another studio.
Once attached to the film was director Larry Charles (“Religulous,” “Borat”), but according to an interview with Coming Soon (via Slash), said he doesn’t know what’s happening with the film and he sounds like he’s no longer attached to it. It sounds like studio politics and absorption/collapse fallout left the film by the wayside. Charles notes that he also thought the film would only work at a NC-17 rating.
“The Motley Crue thing I was really into and I did a lot of work on it. I wrote a pass on the script and everything, but it was at MTV Films which then got swallowed by Paramount Vantage which then got swallowed by Paramount. All those people were gone that developed it and it got put to the side, so I don’t know what’s going to happen to it. Also my thing about that which was that I felt it had to be an NC-17 movie, and I thought, ‘Well that would be ballsy to do. When was the last time they had a mainstream NC-17 movie?’ That’d be a good idea.’ “
But yeah, no. No major studio is going to take on an NC-17 movie and certainly not in the film/financial climate we’re in these days. Charles also hilariously shat on the Los Angeles rockers and threw them under the bus.
“Motley Crüe is a crappy band but [Neil Strauss] wrote a really epic book about them. It’s really fascinating. What’s good about it is how hardcore it is. They’ve killed people, they’ve hurt people, they’ve crippled people, they’ve done all kinds of crazy things. You’d have to show that for real and I think there was a little bit of reticence about doing that ultimately. But for me, I would do it if it could be done the proper way. If it’s going to be sanitized then they don’t need me to do it. They could find somebody else to do that.”
Don’t necessarily assume that means the end of this film project, the Crüe are hot to get this thing made, especially Nikki Sixx, so while it might take a few years to get back in their hands, they seem pretty driven to get that story told on screen in some shape or form come hell or high water. It might be a few years though. Sixx did say in September 2007, that the band and the film producers would not be seeking an NC-17 rating on the film so perhaps he and Charles disagreed on the final tone for a few years now.
BTW, back in the day when this project was announced, there were a ton of hilarious rumors of who would be playing who. Evidently someone started a rumor that Christopher Walken would be playing Ozzy Osbourne and Val Kilmer would be playing David Lee Roth, but Kilmer told MTV earlier this year that rumor was all fiction and he’d never been approached.