I can vividly remember coming home from middle school to turn on MTV and get Carson Daly spouting the “best” in music videos from Korn to Tom Green to Eminem to ‘N Sync on TRL. And although I missed the boat on its early rise to fame, when it literally only had these music videos, MTV has since turned into the go-to spot for the trashiest and worst in reality TV, dropping the focus on music.
Variety now reports that a new feature film plans to capture this early revolution of the network, with none other than Rush Hour and Tower Heist director Brett Ratner. He will team with Sony to produce, while also considering coming on to direct, in the adaptation of Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum’s book I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. Many give Ratner flack, but this kind of sounds like the perfect fit for him, as his name is synonymous with pop entertainment. I can’t imagine them pulling off something like The Social Network, but I’d be interested in seeing this story.
Jody Lambert is writing the script, who is coming off Alex Kurtzman’s directorial debut, the recently retitled People Like Us (previously Welcome to People). That film stars Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Olivia Wilde and Michelle Pfeiffer and will release in late June. As for the MTV film, check out a longer synopsis of the book below.
It was a pretty radical idea-a channel for teenagers, showing nothing but music videos. It was such a radical idea that almost no one thought it would actually succeed, much less become a force in the worlds of music, television, film, fashion, sports, and even politics. But it did work. MTV became more than anyone had ever imagined.
I Want My MTV tells the story of the first decade of MTV, the golden era when MTV’s programming was all videos, all the time, and kids watched religiously to see their favorite bands, learn about new music, and have something to talk about at parties. From its start in 1981 with a small cache of videos by mostly unknown British new wave acts to the launch of the reality-television craze with The Real World in 1992, MTV grew into a tastemaker, a career maker, and a mammoth business.
Featuring interviews with nearly four hundred artists, directors, VJs, and television and music executives, I Want My MTV is a testament to the channel that changed popular culture forever.