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The scourge of heroin use by Black Americans in cities like New York in the 1970s sparked Richard Nixon’s War of Drugs. The goal was to “associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin” and to “disrupt those communities” by “criminalizing both heavily,” Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman said in 2016.

Legs McNeil uses that quote in his documentary, Pusherman: Frank Lucas & The True Story of American Gangster, distributed by Mvd Entertainment, which arrives on streaming service Tubi today (June 24). “I’d never heard it before,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I thought it was a fantastic quote. It made sense because they would raid you, they’d target you. I was targeted as a kid for going to antiwar demonstrations.”

McNeil’s movie focuses on Frank Lucas, the Harlem dope pusher made famous in Ridley Scott’s 2007 druggy saga American Gangster, which was based on a...

Tim Mohr, the acclaimed journalist, author, and translator who collaborated on memoirs with Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan and Kiss frontman Paul Stanley, died Monday at his home in Brooklyn, New York. He was 55.

Mohr’s publisher, Europa Editions, confirmed his death in a message from executive publisher Michael Reynolds. The cause was pancreatic cancer.

“I loved and admired Tim for his eloquence, his moral compass, his large, rebel heart, his consummate cool,” Reynolds wrote. “He had many friends – a testament to his genuine curiosity about other people and their life experiences,...

The legacy of heroin kingpin Frank Lucas, whose story was dramatized in the 2007 narrative feature American Gangster, is the focus of a forthcoming documentary film.

Pusherman explores Lucas’ life through the lens of the lore surrounding Black gangsters and is set for DVD release from Mvd Entertainment Group on June 24. Documentarian and author Legs McNeil directs and narrates the movie.

The film features interviews with Mark Jacobson, the journalist whose New York magazine story initially shed light on Lucas’ operation. Other figures included in the project are crime writer Michael Daly, hip-hop historian Fab 5 Freddy and culture pundit Darius James. Pusherman will delve into how Lucas helped to redefine the drug trade, in addition to what his story said about New York City power structures and how he was embraced by the music community.

“Pusherman is the best Behind the Music episode ever done about a non-musical figure,” says Jacobson.

Pete Davidson is set to star as Joey Ramone in an upcoming Netflix biopic about the late Ramones legend, I Slept With Joey Ramone. The announcement comes on the 20th anniversary of Ramone’s April 15th, 2001 death.

The Saturday Night Live star and his frequent collaborator Jason Orley also penned the treatment for the film — based on the 2010 memoir by the same name written by Ramone’s brother Mickey Leigh — with Orley also directing the biopic. Davidson and Orley previously teamed up for 2019’s Big Time Adolescence and the comedy...

First published back in 1996, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me helped kick off a new trend in the world of music journalism, employing the oral history format to allow people—from all levels of fame and success—to tell their own stories about the wild punk scene of 1970s New York. McNeil and McCain have…...

There’s nothing like the impact of hearing an outrageous story from someone who experienced it firsthand. That’s why Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain wanted to publish an oral history of the Manson Family murders and the late Sixties. “It’s people making bad decisions in real time,” McNeil says. For more than 20 years, the duo has been working on 69, the follow-up to Please Kill Me, their 1996 definitive history of the New York punk scene. They’re almost done, they swear.

Fifty years ago, followers of hippie cult leader Charles Manson shot,...

Sneak Peek "Punk", the new 4-episode documentary TV series, executive produced by Iggy Pop of 'The Stooges' fame, premiering March 11, 2019 on Epix:

"...'Punk' explores the music, the fashion, the art and the attitude of a subculture of self-described misfits and outcasts..."

Interviews include Iggy Pop, Johnny Rotten, Marky Ramone, Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Duff McKagan, Wayne Kramer, Jello Biafra, Flea, Dave Grohl, Danny Fields, Legs McNeil, Penelope Spheeris and a whole lot more...

Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "Punk"...

When the Ramones first performed “Blitzkrieg Bop” at Cbgb some 44 years ago, no one could have imagined the song would be heard in virtually every stadium and in multiple TV spots for mainstream products like Coppertone, GoPro, Peloton, At&T and Taco Bell.

And punk rock, the genre of music that the Ramones and so many others ushered in, seemed destined for an equally short shelf life. Yet despite its built-to-self-destruct ethos, punk rock has not only endured, it continues to attract fans both old and young — anyone who’s read this far has probably already heard about the dust-up between Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon (aka Rotten) and former Ramones drummer Marc Bell at an onstage Q&A last week to promote the film, which is at turns hilarious, pathetic and ridiculous, and often all three at once.

Two current documentaries illustrate the genre’s remarkable durability and continued relevance:...

Spike your mohawk and safety pin your ripped shirts because award-winning fashion designer John Varvatos and music legend Iggy Pop are teaming to bring a bit of rebellion to TV. The pair will serve as executive producers of Punk, a four-part docuseries that has been greenlit by Epix.

Varvatos will partner with filmmaker Derik Murray’s Network Entertainment to produce the quintessential story of punk which is currently in production and is set to premiere on Epix on March 11, 2019. Murray will also produce the docuseries which will be directed by Jesse James Miller.

The docuseries will feature original, exclusive interviews with America’s punk pioneers and the UK’s most notorious bands. In addition to being Ep, Iggy Pop will lend his voice to the Punk narrative alongside Johnny Rotten (Sex Pistols/Public Image Ltd./PiL), Marky Ramone (Ramones), Debbie Harry and Chris Stein (Blondie), Duff McKagan (Guns N’ Roses...

American journalist and author Tim Mohr admits that when he first arrived in Berlin in 1992, he was clueless to the reality of what the post-Wall city would look like. “I thought all of Germany was Oktoberfest basically,” he told punk writer Legs McNeil at Brooklyn record store Rough Trade last week to celebrate the release of his new book Burning Down the Haus. “I was shocked when I got off the plane and everyone wasn’t wearing lederhosen and holding giant beer steins.”

Rather than a Teutonic cartoon landscape, he...

In Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's essential book on New York's Seventies subcultural scene, the authors dedicate their work to Danny Fields, "forever the coolest guy in the room." He may not be a household name, but as a manager, publicist, label exec and journalist, Fields was always at the center of every important rock movement for two decades – the six-degrees-of-separation connection between the Beatles and "Beat on the Brat."

Danny Says, a new doc on the music-industry multi-hyphenate currently in theaters,...

Every Monday my Facebook feed is filled with people kvetching about Vinyl, the new HBO series created by Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger and Terence Winters. Every criticism I see is valid (the pace is slow, the characters and the situations in which they find themselves are unbelievable), but I still kind of like it.

If you haven’t watched, you should know that Vinyl is about a record company struggling through the changes in music and culture in the early mid-1970s. I moved to New York full time a few years later, so perhaps some of the reason I like it is that it reminds me of my lost youth.

Bobby Cannavale plays Richie Finestra, the head of the company, a drug addict with no moral code (is that redundant?) who uses people in his pursuit of money and more drugs. We are supposed to believe that his love...

The adage "sex, drugs and rock & roll" can best be used describe the music scene in the Seventies, an era where all genres were fueled by everything from alcohol and marijuana to cocaine and Quaaludes. The third installment of 1973: Shaping the Culture, a new video series from Rolling Stone presented by HBO's new show Vinyl, delves into the influence – both creative and destructive – drugs had on the music scene.

"Music is affected by the drugs you take, which is completely accurate," journalist Legs McNeil says. "When you're taking cocaine and drinking,...

Nile Rodgers, the Strokes' Albert Hammond Jr., author Fran Lebowitz and more reminisce about the style of the early Seventies in the second installment of 1973: Shaping the Culture, a new video series from Rolling Stone, presented by HBO's new show Vinyl.

"What's great about '73 is that, everybody forgets this, but kind of that pimp look," Please Kill Me author Legs McNeil says. "That whole kind of Isaac Hayes, Shaft look. And the white guys made glam out of it ... You gotta remember that men's fashions were really ugly.

Nile Rodgers, rock journalist Legs McNeil and more recall the birth of punk and the gritty, gross glory of Cbgb in the first installment of 1973: Shaping the Culture, a new video series from Rolling Stone, presented by HBO's new show Vinyl.

Hilly Kristal opened Cbgb & Omfug — "Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music for Undernourished Gormandizers," though McNeil notes Kristal frequently changed the meaning of the "U" — in 1973 in the heart of the Bowery, at that time one of New York's nastiest neighborhood. The location, however, was the perfect place...

Cbgb begins with a bit of misdirection. You think punk started at 315 Bowery. You’re wrong. It began in a basement in Connecticut with two ne’er-do-wells, John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil. There, according to the film—a mostly turgid, boring-as-hell, campy slog that gets more wrong than right—the two created Punk magazine, and thusly punk. Never mind that you can’t have a zine that covers punk if punk doesn’t already exist, or that McNeil’s contention that he coined the term has long been disputed. Cbgb treats his claim as gospel. It’s the film’s lede. From there, we’re off to the wrongheaded races. Cut to: a baby jumping from its crib and running for miles through a Hightstown, New Je...

Arturo Vega—the graphic artist who designed the Ramones' famed "Hey Ho Let's Go" seal, and was often referred to as "the fifth Ramone"—died Saturday at the age of 65. Rolling Stone reported that Vega's friend, Please Kill Me author Legs McNeil, was the first to break the news. The official cause of death has yet to be released. Vega grew up in Chihuahua, Mexico, moving to the United States in the 1970s and taking up residency in a Bowery loft near Cbgb. It was there he befriended the Ramones, quickly becoming one of its earliest and ...

Chubby Checker's lawsuit over a smartphone app that claims to measures penis size is the latest in a checkered record at attempting to maintain relevancy through the twists and turns of pop culture.

The app is is called the "Chubby Checker" referring to a slang term for an erection.

The 71-year-old Checker, whose real name is Ernest Evans, is suing Hewlett Packard and its subsidiary Palm, Inc. for $500 million, claiming the app associates his name with obscene, sexual connotation and images, without giving him "compensation for the unauthorized use of the Chubby Checker name and trademark," Webosnation.com reported.

The lawsuit comes as Checker tries to reinvigorate his career by promoting "Changes," a new single.

"With all of this activity surrounding the excitement and the legend, we're more interested in airplay than litigation," Checker said in a statement to The Huffington Post. "As they say in the legal community,...

Like many old people, New Year’s Eve makes me remember earlier times. When I was young. When I knew who the new bands were. When I was cool. Once one has children, one is never cool again.

There was a period of time in the mid-1970s when I dropped out of college and went to work for an antiwar magazine. We had a barter arrangement with lots of underground newspapers and magazines, so I got to read Creem magazine, and from that and the Village Voice, I knew who all the cool bands were and where to see them in New York.

When I decided to go back to college for my degree, I kept up subscriptions to Creem and the Voice, and it was from these that I discovered Punk.

Not the music, although also the music. No, I mean Punk, a magazine that combined my two greatest passions,...

Who's responsible for turning Cbgb's into the petri dish that unleashed punk rock onto the world?

It's long been known that the idea didn't originate with the club's owner, Hilly Kristal, who died in 2007, a year after the famously dingy venue closed its doors. He named the club Cbgb-Omfug, short for Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gourmandizers, and expected to feature those genres, not the noisy creations of a bunch of arty freaks.

A recent e-book by longtime tour manager Larry Butler gives Television singer and guitarist Tom Verlaine credit for making Cbgb's cool. Here's how music-industry veteran Bob Lefsetz paraphrased Butler's account yesterday in his popular newsletter, the Lefsetz Letter:

Hilly Kristal was an unwitting beneficiary of Tom Verlaine's inability to find anywhere to feature Television. Yup, Verlaine asked Hilly to play at Cbgb, a relatively dead bar, on a dead night,...

Casting for the Cbgb biopic has resulted in some interesting choices, and the names just keep on coming. The film found its most recent addition in Donal Logue, a character actor and occasional leading man who’s notable for his work on the short-lived, well-loved FX series, Terriers. Logue will play Merv Ferguson, the man who helped owner Hilly Kristal (Alan Rickman) keep the legendary club in order. [THR]

Working on a script by Jody Savin, director Randall Miller (Bottle Shock) will helm the story of New York’s music scene, and how Cbgb helped launch some of the biggest rock n’ roll acts of the past four decades before closing its doors in 2008.

Besides Logue, other stars who jumped on board recently are Joel David Moore, Stana Katic, Johnny Galecki (The Big Bang Theory) as manager Terry Ork, Mickey Sumner (The Borgias) as singer Patti Smith, and Ashley Greene as Kristal’s daughter,...

Taylor Hawkins cast as Stooges frontman in forthcoming biopic of New York punk venue

Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins is to step into Iggy Pop's skinny jeans.

Hawkins has signed on to play the Stooges frontman in new film Cbgb, which tells the story of the legendary New York punk club. He will join former Harry Potter star Rupert Grint, who is playing Cheetah Chrome, guitarist with Cbgb regulars the Dead Boys. Malin Åkerman will follow her turn in Rock of Ages as Blondie's Debbie Harry. The cast will also include Alan Rickman as venue boss Hilly Kristal, Mickey Sumner as Patti Smith, the Big Bang Theory's Johnny Galecki as Television manager Terry Ork, Steven Schub as Dee Dee Ramone, Evan Alex Cole as Richard Hell, Peter Vack as Legs McNeil and Kerry Bisché as Mary Harron.

The story follows Kristal in his efforts to turn the tiny club into a groundbreaking rock venue.

Those working on Cbgb have wasted no time in compiling their supporting players. We’ve seen the main actors (Alan Rickman, Rupert Grint, Malin Akerman, Joel David Moore, and Stana Katic) jump into the fray over these past two and a half weeks, but today has brought seven (seven!) new performers into the historical music scene fray. First, THR informs us that Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins will take on the legendary Iggy Pop; Deadline says Johnny Galecki (The Big Bang Theory) is appearing as manager Terry Ork; and Variety reports that Mickey Sumner (The Borgias, Imogene) will play singer Patti Smith.

Additionally, Steven Schub (24, Chicago) will play DeeDee Ramone; Evan Alex Cole (She’s Out of My League) is appearing as Richard Hell; Kerry Bische (Red State) has been cast in the part of Mary Harron (some research indicates that this is, in fact, the American Psycho director); and...

Taylor Hawkins has a lust for life.

The Foo Fighters drummer is preparing to get shirtless (a lot) as he signs on for the role of legendary punk rocker Iggy Pop in "Cbgb," according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Iggy Pop was the frontman of Iggy Pop and the Stooges, one of the most influential punk bands from the late '68s through the mid-'70s with hits such as "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "Search and Destroy." Iggy was infamous for his antagonistic and outrageous stage antics (which were inspired by Doors lead singer Jim Morrison) and is considered the first performer to ever do a "stage dive."

Taylor Hawkins is just one of many new additions to the "Cbgb" cast, with recent hit-makers including Johnny Galecki as music manager Terry Ork, Mickey Sumner as Patti Smith, Steven Schub as Dee Dee Ramone, Evan Alex Cole as Richard Hell,...

Here are today's casting notes at a glance: Christina Ricci (Black Snake Moan) is set to join the cast of drama, Mother's Day (not the awesome horror movie with Rebecca De Mornay). Johnny Galecki (Big Bang Theory) and Taylor Hawkins of Foo Fighters are set to join Cbgb's cast. Ashley Tisdale (The Suite Life of Zack and Cody) will star in the fifth installment of the Scary Movie franchise, ingeniously titled Scary Movie 5. Hit the jump for more details. First up via Deadline is the news that Ricci will be joining real life mother/daughter duo, Susan Sarandon and Eva Amurri Martino, in writer/director Paul Duddridge's Mother's Day. The picture explores the relationships between 12 mothers and daughters. So far, three of the 24 leads appear to have been filled. Cbgb, the pic from writer/director Randall Miller (Bottle Shock) that centers on the iconic New York club, has...

A few weeks ago, BAMcinématek teased us with the announcement of 11 films from their 2012 program. Now, BAMcinématek has announced the complete main slate for the fourth annual BAMcinemaFest (June 20 — July 1, 2012). The 12-day festival presents premieres of emerging voices in American independent cinema. With 20 New York premieres and one North American premiere, the young festival includes films culled from Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, Berlin, Rotterdam, Slamdance, and SXSW. Opening Night: Sleepwalk With Me (Mike Birbiglia) Mike Birbiglia’s adaptation of his hit off-Broadway one-man show. Co-written and produced by Ira Glass, who has featured Birbiglia on This American Life, this hilarious and poignant autobiographical exploration stars Birbiglia as a bartender at a Park Slope comedy club who moves in with his long-term girlfriend (Lauren Ambrose). On top of his struggles with his relationship and his stand-up career, Birbiglia also battles an extreme form of sleepwalking where he acts out his dreams—even...

If we sifted through your old drawers and boxes and published all the love letters you wrote at 20 years old, chances are there would be some embarrassing phrases.

And what if we went back even further? A likely treasure trove of "Do You Like Me? Check Yes Or No" letters would rain down from the attic, heart-dotted i's and terrible poetry abounds.

If you're Sid Vicious, the former bassist for the Sex Pistols and one of the world's most renowned punk rock musicians, your love letters are apparently pretty straightforward. At least the one recently published by Letters of Note, a blog that highlights past correspondences.

In his letter, which can be read here in full, Vicious writes a list of things he loves about his then girlfriend, the punk groupie Nancy Spungen, on a piece of torn-out notebook paper.

(Warning: cover you children's eyes for number nine. Or at...

There’s been a lot of noise on two areas of the blogosphere that I follow – comics and politics – because Frank Miller recently posted about the Occupy Wall Street movement on his blog. My favorite response, as usual, was on TBogg’s blog, because I love me some snark.

See that photo over there? It’s had an honorable position on my refrigerator since it was taken about 15 years ago at the San Diego Comic Convention. It’s me and Frank, back when he could still walk the floor.

I’ve known Frank since the late 1970s. I met him soon after I met Denny O’Neil, and we hung out a lot when he was drawing the Amazing Spider-Man Annual #14. My friend, Legs McNeil <http://www.amazon.com/Legs-McNeil/e/B000APOLAA>, was (and is) a huge comic book fan. He managed a band, Shrapnel&tag=comi0a-20, that was essentially Sgt. Rock set to music. We...

Pop Montreal is an international music festival here in Montreal which is celebrating its 10th anniversary from September 21st to the 25th, 2011. Pop is now recognized as an important multidisciplinary taste-making event, expanding its mission through various components: Puces Pop, Art Pop, Film Pop, Kids Pop and the Symposium. For the first time, we here at Sound On Sight will be present to cover Film Pop, a program branched out of a driving desire to create cinematic events within the same independent spirit as Pop Montreal. Film Pop became the first of our 5 segments. It is an annual celebration of the best in music related underground cinema and presents each year bold movies that are making waves in the scene. Through artistic cinematography, it gives the public rare opportunities to attend special viewings and seek to demonstrate the significant place music holds within our society, the world and in movies.

The results are in for Rolling Stone's readers' poll asking who the best punk-rock bands of all time are, and Green Day has topped the list, understandably stoking a bit of controversy. Given that online polls usually wind up being popularity contests, it's not surprising that the California trio would garner the most votes. (And Rolling Stone points out that fan site Green Day Authority and GreenDay.com both posted voting links.) If you want a true list of the best punk bands of all time, you ask a scenester from the golden age, like Legs McNeil, who founded Punk magazine in 1975. He undoubtedly would have the number two and three finishers, The Clash and The Ramones respectively, ahead of Billie Joe and the boys. And Green Day themselves would probably agree with that. Although who you prefer is subjective, you have to give it up to [...]...

Documentary on indie-rock legends The Replacements set to premiere.

Color Me Obsessed, the first documentary about famed 80.s indie-rock band The Replacements, will have its World Premiere at the 5th annual Gasparilla International Film Festival in Tampa, Florida.Gorman Bechard, the film.s director, took top honors at last year.s Giff with his romantic-comedy Friends (With Benefits).

Told through the eyes of fans, friends, and contemporaries, Color Me Obsessed breaks from the traditional music documentary format of music and performances. Not looking to make a VH1/where-are-they-now style documentary Bechard took a unique approach, .I decided to present the band in a more iconic way,. he explains. .I thought, people believe in God without seeing or hearing him but rather through the passion, faith, and stories of others. After watching Color Me Obsessed, I.m pretty sure music fans will believe in The Replacements in much the same way.

(Director, writer, and filmmaker Floyd Mutrux, above.)

By Terry Keefe

It was the 1960s and a foursome took over the popular music charts in America, but they didn’t wear mop-tops. Right before the British Invasion, the girl group known as the Shirelles soared with hits such as “Dedicated to the One I Love,” “Soldier Boy,” “Will You Still Me Tomorrow,” and “Baby It’s You,” amongst many others. The Shirelles were discovered by Florence Greenberg, an ambitious and very prescient New Jersey housewife who founded Scepter Records, and consequently changed the face of popular music forever. In her business life, Greenberg was a woman who dove right into the middle of a male-dominated record industry and created one of the most successful independent labels of the time, and on the personal side, she left her first marriage for a union with African-American songwriter Luther Dixon. The story of Greenberg,...

(Filmmaker Susan Seidelman, above.)

by Jon Zelazny

In the early 80’s NYC cultural lull between Patti Smith’s retirement and Jay McInerney’s breakout, Nyu film school graduate Susan Seidelman did the scrappy shoestring indie film thing, resulting in her acclaimed feature debut Smithereens (1982).

Best known for her hit sophomore effort, Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Seidelman continues to direct movies and TV shows featuring female protagonists… including the pilot for “Sex and the City” and her Oscar nominated short film The Dutch Master (1994), about a shy dental technician who ventures “into” a museum painting for flights of erotic fantasy.

Susan Seidelman: My husband Jonathan Brett—who co-wrote and produced The Dutch Master—and I had committed to living in Paris for a year because I was set to direct a feature for Polygram, a company that unfortunately went bankrupt. So we were kind of in a funk over there, and...

They played songs that set a new land speed record and remained together through 18 years of drugs, dysfunction and failed record sales. Now the Ramones, traditionally dubbed "the godfathers of punk", are to receive the big-screen Hollywood treatment in a biopic entitled I Slept With Joey Ramone. Fox Searchlight is in negotiations to board the bio-pic of the seminal New York punk band, based on a memoir titled "I Slept With Joey Ramone" written by Joey's brother, Mickey Leigh and longtime punk writer and Ramones chronicler Legs McNeil. This is not the first time the Ramones have been featured in a movie. There was the teen rebel comedy Rock n' Roll High School back in 1979, a soon to be remake of that film produced by Howard Stern and the 2004 acclaimed documentary End of the Century, which covered the group's influence and detailed its internal strife, from Dee Dee's drug...

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fox Searchlight is in talks to produce a biopic about the seminal punk rock band The Ramones. The film, which would be based on the forthcoming memoir I Slept With Joey Ramone by Ramone’s brother Mickey Leigh and punk journalist Legs McNeil, would focus on the origins of the band, each member’s myriad problems with drugs (and with each other), and the group’s considerable impact on modern popular music.

The project is being spearheaded by producer Rory Rosegarten. Rosegarten (who is best known as the former executive producer of the TV show Everybody Loves Raymond) bought the rights to I Slept With Joey Ramone while the book was still being written. More importantly, however, when Rosegarten picked up the rights to the book, he also picked up the rights to The Ramones’ music.

Given the commercial and financial success of such popular...

The Ramones will reportedly feature in a forthcoming biopic. Fox Searchlight is in advanced negotiations to make the film about the legendary punk band, reports ABC News. The movie is said to be based on upcoming book I Slept with Joey Ramone, which was written by frontman Joey's brother Mickey Leigh and music journalist Legs McNeil. The project has apparently been in the works since 2006, (more)...

A Ramones biopic -- that being a film that sounds inherently cartoonish in the first place -- would be nothing without the band's music and the leeway to find great talent. An independent production based on the book I Slept with Joey Ramone, written by Joey's brother Mickey Leigh and punk chronicler Legs McNeil (to be published this December), has slowly been gaining ground. But now Fox Searchlight is negotiating a buy-in, which could change a lot of things. THR reports the deal, and rightly suggests that Fox Searchlight's clout could give the movie some momentum. Producer Rory Rosegarten has been going it alone for a while, negotiating rights buys for both the book and the music of the Ramones. That's one place where the Fox Searchlight buy-in could get complicated; any studio/distributor is going to be wary of rights deals negotiated by someone else. And if you're telling...

A reaction to the extreme popularity of a band that produced music that itself was a reaction to the bloated pop music of the 1970s, the Ramones are headed to the big screen. Fox Searchlight, perhaps drafting behind the upcoming bio-pic of The Runaways, is developing a film based on the memoir I Slept with Joey Ramone, written by Joey's brother, Mickey Leigh and music journalist Legs McNeil. The book is due out this December.

This is not the first time - or the last - that the Ramones will be featured in a movie. There was Rock n' Roll High School back in '79, the 2004 documentary End of the Century, and Howard Stern is currently developing a remake of High School.

There's some interesting behind-the-scenes stuff about this project between Searchlight and producer Rory Rosegarten, who picked up the rights to the story while the book was being written,...

There's no stoppin' the cretins from hoppin' -- legendary rockers and pop-culture icons The Ramones may finally be getting their due on the big screen. Gabba gabba hey! Fox Searchlight (aka "the good Fox") is trying to hook a deal for a movie about the influential quartet, based on an upcoming memoir by Joey Ramone’s brother Mickey Leigh and longtime Ramones chronicler Legs McNeil. The movie project, centering of course on the towering singer and various backstage drama...