Eventually, someone is going to adapt Motley Crue’s The Dirt (which I’m still fairly certain is the best book ever written in any language ever) into a movie. There’s too many greenbacks at stake for the project just to sit on the shelf forever.
But I’ve read screenwriter Rich Wilkes’ adaptation of the infamous tome (written by Neil Strauss under the guise of being written by the band members themselves), and it wasn’t going to make a good movie. In fact, I can guarantee you it was going to make a horrible, horrible movie. Wilkes is the writer of such gems as The Jerky Boys movie and xXx, so that news really shouldn’t shock anyone*; in fact, I have to guess that Wilkes got the job ’cause he wrote Airheads, which is probably the last Hollywood movie about metal that is only a semi-embarrassment to the film industry**. Still, Wilkes’ script was all set to go before cameras under the guidance of Borat director/Seinfeld executive producer Larry Charles, who is really way, way, way too talented for this lousy script. At various times, Ashton Kutcher and Johnny Knoxville were rumored to be in talks to play Tommy Lee and Nikki Sixx, respectively, and Christopher Walken and Val Kilmer were alleged to have filled the roles of Ozzy Osbourne and David Lee Roth.
In other words, this thing really had about as much chance of being good as Lars Ulrich does of growing to be six five four feet tall.
So lucky for us all that the project, at least as we’ve known it, seems to be in jeopardy.
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