To call “Spinning Gold” a labor of love is an understatement completely uncharacteristic of its subject: the late Neil Bogart, the larger-than-life founder of Casablanca Records, the famously freewheeling 1970s powerhouse that brought the world Kiss, Donna Summer, Parliament-Funkadelic and the Village People in less than five years.
Some 25 years in the making, the biopic was written, produced and directed by Bogart’s eldest son Tim (who’s worked in those roles on many TV series, from “Majors & Minors” to “The Jungle Book”) with music supervision from his youngest son, Evan (a songwriter and music publisher who co-wrote Beyonce’s “Halo,” among many other hits), and other family members as producers. Out March 31, it features Tony and Grammy-nominated Broadway star Jeremy Jordan (“Newsies,” “Rock of Ages,” “Waitress”) as Bogart, Michelle Monaghan as his first wife, Lyndsy Fonseca as his second, rapper Wiz Khalifa as P-Funk’s George Clinton, singers Ledisi as Gladys Knight and Tayla Parx as Summer, among many others.
Casablanca’s hot streak — and overreach — has had few parallels in music history, and its success was matched only by the unlikeliness of that success: Would anyone have expected a cartoonish hard rock band, an American session singer working in Germany, a drug-addled funk outfit or a disco group made up of gay stereotypes to be enormously influential or score massive global hits (“I Feel Love,” “YMCA,” “Beth”) that endure nearly a half-century later?
Bogart (real name: Neil Scott Bogatz) was a rare combination of gambler and dreamer, businessman and creative, who bet big on long shots and usually won. “He was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn named Bogatz, Kiss was started by a couple of guys from Queens, Bill Withers was installing toilet seats on airplanes,” Tim says. “At face value, none of them should have achieved what they did, but they did — and for my dad, it was always by the skin of his teeth. Over the years, it got crazier and crazier, but the word ‘no’ just was not part of his vocabulary.”
Bogart died of cancer in 1982 at the age of 39 (when Tim was 12 and Evan was 4) but cast a long shadow. He started his career as a singer before moving to the label side, first at Cameo-Parkway Records, where he signed Bob Seger and a distribution deal with Curtis Mayfield, then Buddah Records, where he presided over hits from Mayfield, Withers, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Melanie and a string of songs that are much better-remembered by title than artist: “Oh Happy Day” (Edwin Hawkins Singers), “Ooh Child” (Five Stairsteps), “Want Ads” (Honey Cone), “Brother Louie” (Stories), and even Charlie Daniels’ first hit (“Uneasy Rider”).
He took everything he’d learned (legitimate and otherwise) to Casablanca, where virtually every record-business cliché played out in supreme fashion: the spending, the parties, the drugs, the creative methods of promotion, the connections to organized crime — and it worked … for a while. The company’s fortunes declined with the fall of disco (and Bogart’s dramatically overextended finances), and he sold Casablanca to its distributor, PolyGram, in 1980. But his instincts were strong to the end: Before his death, Bogart founded Boardwalk Records and signed a young Joan Jett.
Despite all the sex, drugs, rock and roll and organized crime, it’s difficult to make a record company’s office life exciting enough to carry a dramatic film or TV series (witness the Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger-backed HBO series “Vinyl,” if anyone remembers it). Although “Spinning Gold” is not immune from those challenges, one thing it accomplishes in dramatic fashion is bringing Bogart and his seemingly irresistible charm to life — he leaves his first wife and marries one of his company’s employees, he tangles with the Mafia, he goes way overboard with cocaine, yet people seemed unable to stay angry with him.
Like the man himself, if Jeremy Jordan-as-Bogart doesn’t always make the viewer completely believe what’s happening on the screen, he’s charming enough to get them to buy in. Jordan admits that when he first got the call, “I knew a lot of the music and zero about Neil Bogart. But,” he continues, “he was a kind of jackpot of all the fun things it is to do with these big characters: He’s got drug problems, girl problems, anger issues, daddy issues, but he was also such an optimist: ‘I know it’s gonna work out because I can see it, I’ve just got to figure out how to get there.’”
Indeed, getting Jordanon board took a Neil Bogart-sized gamble. The film had taken on several iterations over the years — Justin Timberlake was slated to play Neil and co-produce for a period in the early 2010s — but as the film’s casting and shoot dates firmed up late in 2018, Tim had a dark night of the soul about the lead.
“I was in serious discussions with a person who was very close [to being cast],” he recalls, “but then about two months before production began, I had this absolute flop-sweat moment: ‘This is not the right guy — he doesn’t have that that essence.’
“So I called [co-producer] Larry Mark and said, ‘I need a life force. Who is the biggest or best Broadway star?’ And he immediately said Jeremy Jordan, who I had never heard of. So I went on this crazy YouTube search, and was just mesmerized. The next night I got in touch with his rep, jumped on a red-eye — didn’t tell anybody — and met with him. Two days later, we had a very secret read-through, and cast him, truly at the 11th hour. It was probably the best creative choice I’ve ever made.”
Jordan puts that charm to work in the film’s opening scene, with a remarkably disarming device to encourage the audience to buy in. He walks into a church where a gospel choir (portraying the Edwin Hawkins Singers) is joyously soaring through “Oh Happy Day,” plunks down a suitcase full of cash, and says he’s going to sign the group. Just as the viewer is thinking, “Oh, come on,” Jordan turns to the camera with a big smile and says, “This never happened!” In the era of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Elvis,” films so filled with factual inaccuracies and hagiography that they might has well have “based on a true story” disclaimers, it’s a rare meta moment of biopic honesty.
But despite that concession, very little of “Spinning Gold” is truly fiction. “Except for three or four things, it’s actually factually accurate,” Tim says. “For example, my father was not in a room with Gladys Knight, rewriting ‘Midnight Train to Georgia.’ The song was originally called ‘Midnight Plane to Houston,’ like it says in the film, but instead of them discussing changing it over the phone, we put them together. And there were a few other things that were [abridged or made into a composite] to get from one scene to the next.”
Ironically, a couple of true details were intentionally made false because audiences at early screenings didn’t believe they’d actually happened, even if they had. “During one of our first focus-group tests,” Tim recalls, “the audience had a problem with a scene where Ron Isley, played by Jason Derulo, and his brother Rudy are in a meeting. And in the middle of the scene, Rudy pees out the window on Times Square below — he actually did that, it was a joke he apparently did pretty often, but some people in the focus group said it wasn’t believable, even though it was 100% true.”
That airbrushing of history even extended to Kiss’ iconic makeup, which, as ample photographic evidence proves, was slightly different in the band’s early days. “When we released the first trailer with Kiss, there was this reaction that ‘The makeup’s not right!,’” Tim continues. “So even though it was 100% accurate — and [the group’s Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley] were unbelievably helpful with the film, ‘I used this guitar, the costumes were like this’ — we decided to go with people’s perception of reality, strange as that might sound.”
On a similar note, Wiz Khalifa had not met George Clinton before portraying him in the film, but that wasn’t the impediment it might have been in years past. “My parents listened to a lot of Parliament-Funkadelic so I was up on the music,” he says. “And you can find anything on YouTube, interviews, concerts, a lot of different moments, so I dug into that. This was my first real movie, so I was nervous, but I just relaxed and leaned into the role.”
“He did his homework!” Clinton adds in a promotional video for the film.
While surprisingly little film footage of Bogart himself exists, there’s no question that he lives on in his sons, who share a striking number of his characteristics — even though Evan grew up with Neil’s second wife, Joyce, and did not live with his older siblings. “I worked with Donna Summer on her last album, we wrote a song together called ‘The Queen Is Back,’” Evan recalls. “She was just staring at me during the session because she said she felt like she was in the room with my dad.
“And one time I went to Kiss’ management offices to pick up concert tickets, and some guy was sitting in the waiting room, just staring at me,” he continues. “I was like, ‘Yeah?,’ and he said, ‘I feel like I’m having an acid trip —you look just like your dad.’”
Jordan seconds that emotion. “Tim and Evan are definitely two sides of the same coin, with this sort of go-for-broke, trust-your-gut attitude that I’m sure comes from their dad. And as we worked together more and more, it became very clear that this film was going to be a kind of über-meta process. Finally, I was like, ‘I’m basically playing a strange version of Tim.’”
Although Tim and other members of the family have vivid memories of Casablanca’s artists and culture — “From earliest childhood, I literally would go from school right to the Casablanca office and sit on the floor,” he recalls — there was one extraordinary coincidence that took place in the early stages of writing the script.
“I was struggling to understand my dad’s early life, where he really came from,” Tim says. “Even the interviews I’d done didn’t give me much. But then one day we were cleaning out my mother’s garage, and we found this box.
“In 1981, when my father was first diagnosed with cancer, he’d started writing his life story,” he continues. “But then they thought he’d beaten [cancer], so they boxed up the manuscript and everyone forgot about it —but then the cancer came back the following year and he died very quickly. That’s what was in the box. I wish it was complete — it ended right around the time he got to Buddah — but it was that critical piece that I was missing, about what it felt like to be a poor kid in Brooklyn.
“I don’t really believe in this kind of stuff, but to have that sort of message in a bottle from him, at the exact moment I was searching for it, was kind of strange.”
For the family, “Spinning Gold” is not only a labor of love, it’s also been an expansive form of therapy. “I’ve seen it at least 50 times, maybe more,” Evan says. “And I still can’t make it through the movie without crying at that last monologue at the end, where the Neil character says, ‘You all know Donna and Gene and Paul and George and Gladys, but I’ll bet there’s not one of you out there that knows my fucking name.’ I get emotional even talking about it,” he says, briefly misting up. “I think it’s an amazing homage to his spirit and the passion that he had for music and musicians and artists, and dreaming and really fighting for what he believed in.”
And the legacy continues. Tim was speaking from Northern Italy, where he was shooting their next film, “Verona,” a musical starring Rebel Wilson and Rupert Everett based on the real story of Romeo and Juliet — with music by Evan and, as second unit director, Tim’s 19-year-old daughter, Quinn.
