In Vinyl, Jagger and Scorsese expose the madness and passion inside the record industry
Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese are about to unveil their New York music biz drama Vinyl, which focuses not on the well-known excesses of the stars but on the people Jagger thinks were ‘really crazy’: the executives
Sometime in the mid-1990s, after grunge and before the boy band era, Mick Jagger approached Martin Scorsese with an idea for a movie about the music business. The project would span several decades of rock history and focus not on decadent musicians, as one might expect, but on the executives who ran the record labels.
“Everyone was very familiar with all the musicians’ excesses of the period – throwing televisions out the window, excessive sex and drugs and all this sort of thing,” says The Rolling Stones frontman, lounging in his capacious (and very much intact) hotel suite last month. “My observation was that the business people were really crazy.”
SEE ALSO: Q&A with the stars and creators in this weekend’s Post magazine
Twenty years and numerous incarnations later, Jagger’s vision has finally been realised in Vinyl, which premieres on HBO in Hong Kong on Monday with a two-hour pilot directed by Scorsese.
Set primarily in 1973 New York City, the drama stars Bobby Cannavale as Richie Finestra, the coke-snorting president of an embattled record label called American Century. Olivia Wilde co-stars as Richie’s wife, a sobered-up former denizen of Andy Warhol’s Factory now living in the Connecticut suburbs, and Ray Romano as the sleazy head of promotions at American Century. Its show runner is Boardwalk Empire’s Terence Winter.
Both the excess and the energy of the period were evident during a visit to Vinyl’sBrooklyn set last autumn. Cannavale and several dozen extras clad in black leather, gold lamé and frayed denim were filming a raucous party scene at American Century’s earth-toned, smoke-filled offices.