Few music executives can claim to have the influence Neil Bogart had in the 1970s. Besides being the founder of Casablanca Records, the most successful independent record label of all time, Neil Bogart helped discover game-changing artists such as KISS, Donna Summer, and Village People. Neil has also helped musicians such as Gladys Knight and Bill Withers to launch some of the most famous singles. However, as an executive, Bogart’s unbelievable story was doomed to oblivion. At least until his son, Timothy Scott Bogart decided to write, direct, and produce Spinning Gold, a musical biopic about his late father’s journey and the meteoric rise of Casablanca Records.
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Starring Tony Award-winner Jeremy Jordan as Neil Bogart, Spinning Gold is about to hit theaters, transporting the audiences to the late 1960s and early 1970s. By telling the story of Neil Bogart, Timothy Bogart wants to reveal how his father was responsible for some of the most incredible feats in the history of music, like changing LaDonna Adrian Gaines’ legal name to Donna Summer or managing to keep KISS together while their records were still not selling. It’s an unbelievable story that is, nevertheless, true. So, before Spinning Gold hit theaters, we sat down with Bogart to talk about the biopic and the decades-long journey to crafting this ambitious film.

While Spinning Gold is just now coming to theaters, the movie has been a long time in development. The first time we heard about the project was in 2011 when Justin Timberlake was attached as a producer and leading the movie cast as Neil Bogart himself. In 2013, Spike Lee was also in early talks to direct. That Spinning Gold managed to escape development hell and emerge successful in theaters after so long seems miraculous. Still, as Bogart tells us, the development of Spinning Gold began way earlier. As the filmmaker tells us, “I set the film up for the first time at a studio in 1999. It was the first option on this picture.”

Image via Jonathan Wenk

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A lot has happened since 1999, and Bogart can retrace the movie’s inception even earlier. Neil Bogart died from cancer in 1982 at the age of 39. Right after his death, some producers reached out to the Bogart family, trying to secure the rights to turn this story into a movie. For a few years, Timothy Bogart didn’t want to be involved with the project. However, after finishing college and getting inside the filmmaking industry, Bogart decided to tackle his father’s story himself. As he tells us:

“Having a father as larger than life as my father was, it was very quick. Frankly, after his death, it was only a couple of years before people started asking for the rights, they didn’t wait long. We were not really ready as a family yet early on, for that. I was 12 years old when he passed away. But as I started getting into the film business, I did it pretty, pretty early. I finished college at 17. And by 18 I was working. And people continued every year to sort of ask about the rights. And I started thinking about what this movie could be and what the story could be. And I think as any son, looking back at their parents, it became a very interesting journey for a kid to sort of investigate who their father was. Not just the famous music person, but where do you come from? What was that journey? And the more I studied him, the more fascinating story I thought it was. And then as a storyteller, I thought, ‘lucky me, I get this story! Forget that he’s my father, I just get this great story of this guy. And I get to tell it, that’s crazy!’”

Image via Howling Wolf Productions

Bogart spent the next decade slowly piecing his father’s history together until he could present the project to Timberlake. Unfortunately, Timberlake’s music career led him to give up the part of Neil Bogart, but as Spinning Gold’s director says, the whole process happened in a friendly way. Remembering the early stages of production of his movie, Bogart said:

“So in 1999, I had no intention to direct the picture. I was going to write it and produce it. And we started developing it. And it took quite a while to figure out what part of this story do you actually tell. There’s so much music, there are so many artists. One story is better than the other, one is crazier and harder to believe than the other, but they’re all true. So crafting, it became a long journey. And it wasn’t until years later… I still hadn’t quite put together the whole idea for it. And somebody mentioned Justin Timberlake, and there was no script. So I mean, there was a script, but it wasn’t something I could show. So I decided to meet with Justin. And I was trying to figure out how best to tell him what this movie was about. He knew the music. And I basically said, I’m going to use your language, I’m just going to tell you his greatest hits. And one after another, I told the story behind each of my father’s consequential hits. And in the room, he said, I must play this character, I must produce the movie with you, we’ll do it together. And so began a really wonderful journey for many, many years with Justin. He helped me set it up in another studio. And then we started talking about different directors at the time. And ultimately, while we developed it, through the years, Justin had his own career, a challenge between music and acting. And every time he’d sort of get ready to do another movie, the music would kind of seep up again. So we kept delaying it so he could do the music. And ultimately, I had reached the place where I thought the script was finally the story I wanted to tell. He had just done [2013 album] ‘The 20/20 Experience’. So he had years of tours ahead of him. And we just decided that — you know very amicably, a wonderful guy to work with — that I was going to take it back and do it on my own at that point. And that began a different journey to do it independently and to cast it differently. And ultimately, we ended up with the film that we made, which I’m very very proud of.”

Even though he had a script ready around 2013, it still wasn’t easy for Bogart to make Spinning Gold independently. That’s because, while his father was so important to the US music industry, he was ultimately unknown. Talking about the challenges of developing his biopic, Bogart says:

“Hollywood does like a great music biopic. In all honesty, they didn’t like this one, because they didn’t know who he was. If I wanted to do the Donna Summer story, they were there. If I wanted to do the Kiss story, they were there. It was an ongoing challenge because the guy [Neil Bogart] was unknown. Now to me, forget that he’s my father, he’s a cool character. What I thought was interesting was that I will never be Gene Simmons. I can’t perform like that. I can’t play like that. I will never be Ron Isley. I will never be Curtis Mayfield, I could be that guy, Neil Bogart. He didn’t have that extra special voice or talent. He had a drive. And he took a gamble on himself. And I thought, for an audience, that’s an interesting character that they could relate to, wrapped up in this incredible music and stories they think they know. That, to me, was what was interesting. But it was not easy in Hollywood. Even though people were interested in the rights, actually getting them to commit to making it… We would always sort of get to a point like, ‘I don’t know, will the audience know who this person is?’ And I always thought that was a strength, we’ll see.”

Imaghe via Jonathan Wenk

While most musical biopics have to find actors to play a single artist or the members of a single band, Spinning Gold had the monumental challenge of bringing dozens of musicians to the silver screen. To ensure he wouldn’t lose control of the movie’s scope, Bogart decided to frame the narrative as the origin story of all these amazing people. This decision would help Spinning Gold to hit theaters because, as Bogart puts it:

“Early on, you know, we made the decision, and I think was the right decision, that I wanted to tell the origin stories of the songs and the origin stories of these artists. To try to recreate Bill Withers ‘Lean on Me’ is a fool’s errand. You will never recreate that master recording, you will never recreate ‘Midnight Train to Georgia.’ However, finding out what it sounded like the first time they sang it, while they were still writing it, while they were figuring it out, I thought that was fascinating. Once I committed to do that, I also knew I didn’t want to mimic the performers. I didn’t want someone to look exactly like Donna Summer, or exactly like Gene Simmons, I wanted people to be the origin stories of whom those people became. Because interestingly, in this particular story of these particular artists, none of them were who we thought they were. Gene Simmons was not Gene Simmons. He was a guy named Chaim Witz. Paul Stanley was Stanley Eisen and Donna Summer was LaDonna Gaines and Neil Bogart was Neil Bogatz. They were all playing someone else. So when I was casting Gene Simmons, I wasn’t casting Gene Simmons, I was casting Chaim Witz, who created a character named Gene Simmons. So to begin with, I didn’t want them to look alike. I wanted the audience to have a different lens to enter the story with people that they kind of knew, music they sort of knew, but they were going to get a new experience. Because when this happened, it was a new experience. And I wanted the audience to feel like what those songs came when they were born.”

Image via Howling Wolf Productions

By focusing the story on the emergency of beloved artists, instead of their biggest performances, Bogart created an expansive story he could still manage. After that, it was easy to find the right cast members to help his project come true. As Bogart reveals, the casting process was simple because:

“In casting Ron Isley, you want the greatest revolutionary powerful voice and, you know, a person who is bucking the trends and going up against the establishment. That’s Jason Derulo. I mean, who else would you cast? So I think I had the great gift of being able to go to Jason Derulo. And not saying, ‘Hey, would you like to play this guy, George’, but ‘would you like to play Ron Isley?’ So I think I got very, very lucky and I had it easier than some, because that’s a wonderful thing for someone to play. To go to Wiz Khalifa and say, ‘Would you like to play the godfather of all of this, George Clinton?’ So I think it was so much fun for these artists, for Ledisi with that extraordinary voice who, you know, ‘do you want to play Gladys Knight?’ So I think I was very lucky, in that I had wonderful roles to offer. But I think it was also very smart, to not try to mimic the actual real people and to find the essence of who they were. And that was very important to me. And hopefully, audiences will appreciate that.”

While Bogart’s Spinning Gold pays homages to many influential musicians, there was not enough time in a single movie to tell the story of every single his father helped launch. As expected, some things had to be cut out of the script or left behind in the editing room. Nevertheless, Bogart didn’t want to lose focus of the story he was trying to tell, which is why he only added musical numbers that helped the audience to understand his father’s journey. As Bogart reveals:

“Right up until shooting, we were doing a whole sequence with Curtis Mayfield. And the wonderful Ty Dolla Sign was going to play Curtis and he was going to do ‘Superfly.’ And I looked at the running time up until that point, because we had already shot a bunch, and like, ‘this movie is going to be six hours long!’ So that was a great disappointment not being able to work with time and do Curtis Mayfield. I will say, to not do ‘YMCA’ and the Village People which was so consequential to Casablanca success. And I have a wonderful relationship with Victor Willis, so the opportunity was there. But ultimately I felt this story was about reaching the success, not what happened after. And I think by the time we got to the end, and you see I do a little tip of the hat to it. But I thought if I then went for another 10 minutes to tell the Village People story, I think it would [lead to] ‘but we’re done now, we get it.’ And so, there were great songs that came after, there were so many wonderful songs that came before. We had a whole section at one time with Cameo-Parkway, the record company between MGM and Buddha. And ultimately, we just had to dive into not just what were the most important songs to my father, in terms of when they affected and changed his career path. But what songs helped to tell the story. And that was very important to me, as I use the songs not as performances, but as narrative. So you know, I like to say that when we do ‘Midnight Train to Georgia,’ that was the song that metaphorically and physically transported my father from Buddah Records to Casablanca, from New York to Los Angeles, from one woman to another. And so I was able to use that song to tell so much story. The song ‘Beth’ was yes, originally written for Peter Criss’ wife, but they changed it to mess with my father by naming the song after my mother. So all those songs became very meaningful to the story, not just parts of the story. And that ultimately is what we ended up choosing. But there was lots I didn’t have the opportunity to make. Probably ‘YMCA’ was one of the biggest regrets, I would have loved to have it.”

If there was so much content that could be added to Spinning Gold, why make it a movie? Wouldn’t the story be better suited for a TV show? Well, according to Bogart:

“We actually developed it [as a series] for a while. There’s a number of people, especially when event series had just started becoming really hot at the time, everyone said, ‘Oh, that story that you’ve been trying to do as a film, do it as a mini series.’ And for some reason, I just thought it risked diluting the story of my father, and becoming the story of the era. And I think the era is spectacular. And I’ve hopefully done it justice with my love for the era. But I thought extending it beyond this story would make it no longer about his arc, and more about so many other things. I thought it would dilute it. And ultimately, I thought his arc was rather fascinating. And that was a story I wanted to tell.”

Image via Howling Wolf Films

Still, while Bogart chose to stick with the film biopic format for Spinning Gold, he didn’t follow the expected structure of the subgenre. For instance, Spinning Gold favors a non-linear progression in which we go back and forth in time, witnessing the biggest failures and achievements of Neil Bogart. There are a couple of reasons why the director did this. As Bogart explains:

“The first reason I think is perhaps the simplest, which is nobody knows who Neil Bogart is. So I think if I started with ‘meet an eight year old kid. Now he’s an 18 year old person. Now he’s 24.’ By the time we got to, ‘oh, he was involved in this thing called Casablanca Records.’ I think the audience wouldn’t be as invested. So that was a reason, an important reason. But the other thing that I thought was so fascinating was that if you track the two real arcs of the story, the rise of Buddha Records and the near fall of Casablanca Records, he’s doing the same thing in each timeline. He’s betting on someone no one else bets on, but for some reason, everything at Buddha works. But everything of Casablanca fails. And I thought that was a fascinating juxtaposition to keep saying, ‘Okay, ‘Lean on Me’ worked, but ‘Love to Love You’ didn’t. That’s interesting. ‘Midnight Train [to Georgia]’ work but ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’ didn’t. That’s interesting.’ And so by bouncing back and forth, I think the audience starts to believe, ‘but he must know something, because it worked,’ then they’re rooting for him to make it work. Now, I thought it would give the audience a connection to his struggle, because they saw him succeed. And they saw his instincts be right. And interestingly, in the Casablanca timeline, they know he’s ultimately right. The audience, for the most part knows Kiss works, because they’re performing next month. They know Donna works. They know these bands work. Suddenly, the movie becomes a mystery. ‘I know it works. I don’t know why it’s not working.’ And I think that that created an interesting contract with the audience to say, ‘I now don’t know how this music biopic works, because I thought I knew everything coming in, and clearly I don’t.’ And so it was very much structured that way to help the audience get invested in a person they do not know, who has been lost to history, but be able to hold on to something that they did know and root to get there.”

Another significant change Spinning Gold added to the classic musical biopic format comes from its ending. There are many scenes in which we see Neil Bogart bathed in red light, in anticipation of his premature ending. However, Spinning Gold wraps the story on a hopeful note, not a tragic one. According to Bogart, the reason for this is that:

“My father definitely died tragically because he was 39. But he didn’t die of drugs. He died of cancer. So most music biopics — and I love them all — they almost all have a very similar line, which is you meet someone with great talent, you see their rise to success, and then you see them fall to excess, with some version of a needle in their arm. They overdose, something happens. That’s not what happened to my father, my father just sadly got sick. But coming into it, I knew that 90% of the audience will have no idea what happens to him. So it will be on the ride. I will tell you, over all those years of developing with the studio, so many people wanted the last 30 minutes to be him getting sick, and everybody coming to him. And I thought, ‘I can’t think a happier way to leave a theater is just investing in someone and watching them die.’ My father was the life of every party he was at. And the last thing he would want to make is a movie about himself that didn’t have people dancing out of the theater. And so that was an early compass for me that I needed to find a construct that took us on the journey. That certainly suggested that there’s more going on here that you may or may not know. But even at the end, to have it be as abrupt as it was for him, because it happened within a year, he got sick and he died, it happened very quickly. But ultimately, his conversation with the audience is really what I think everyone reaches at the end of the life at some point. ‘Was my life worth it? Did I do good? Did I have value?’ And the whole movie is really him just questioning: ‘Did I have any value, did I mean something, did what I do matter?’ And then this music keeps playing at the end, even in tragedy, and therefore it’s undeniable, what he did mattered. And hopefully you have people leaving the theater, yes, perhaps a little sad for him, but what I really want people leaving the theater is walking out going, ‘what did I do today? Or what can I do today?’ Because that guy lived more in 39 years than anyone I’ve ever seen. Because my father had a thirst for life. I think you only create music and success like that if you do. And that I think is the ultimate message which is gonna matter. And therefore that’s an up ending, and a hopeful ending, and a hopeful message. Not a cautionary tale. I don’t think there was a cautionary tale for this particular character to learn. Because as he says, in the end, ‘I wouldn’t change a thing.’ And I don’t think you would have.”

Another thing that might surprise audiences is the fact Bogart didn’t refrain from exploring his father’s drug addiction, gambling problems, and even his extramarital affair. For the director, it was crucial to add these elements to the story because:

“I didn’t think those were his flaws. I don’t. And I know that other people might disagree. If my father was not an addict — and he was an addict for everything. If he wasn’t a gambler — and he was an incredibly dangerous gambler. He never would have had the success. He never would have become the guy he became if he wasn’t the guy he was. So to shy away from that, not only was that dishonest, but it wasn’t interesting. And first and foremost. I wasn’t his son. I was a filmmaker. So first I want what’s the most interesting story and to me, his failings were fascinating to me. And I thought that made a very interesting guy. I will tell you, my biggest concern was the story between my mother and my stepfather, and that ultimately the audience would not like him for that. But it’s really what happened. He was in love with these two women, it happened. And to me, I thought that was a story I hadn’t really seen, where we didn’t do incredible judgment, we just let it breathe, that this is what happened. Life is messy. Life is complicated. And that was important for me to capture.”

Image via Atlantic Records

Before saying goodbye, Bogart also spoke about his personal connection with Spinning Gold, and how he coped with developing a movie about his father for two decades. For the filmmaker, there were three distinct moments. First:

“Early on, I was doing the story of my father. Then it was not my father, it was a character named Neil Bogart. And it really became very distant. And it wasn’t my mother, it was a character named Beth. And it wasn’t my aunt and my uncle. And that went on for a very long time. And suddenly it was Jeremy Jordan playing this character that all things happened. But I found a distance to it. It really wasn’t until very, very late in the end, when I was actually seeing the final mix, I remember when I was sitting there watching the very end, the end credits when I have the images of him for real. And that was a moment where it washed over me and reminded me, ‘this is my father, and this is my mother’ and it kind of came full circle. But I will say for a long time I was able to distance myself and say, ‘What’s the most interesting story about this particular character that I can tell?’ And I think it was important for me to create that distinction. But ultimately, to tell a love letter to your parent, that’s a great gift to be able to do. So I’m so honored I was able to tell my family story this way. And it was a gift to be able to have the chance.”

Spinning Gold is now in select theaters.