Neil Bogart: Last News

Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco has unveiled the dates for his ‘It Ain’t Right’ tour, his touring run for 2024 which kicks off at Norfolk Scope Arena in Norfolk, VA on July 11 and will be the biggest of his career to date.

A.D. Amorosi Perhaps without you realizing it, there’s a strong chance that the last 12 months of your life have been graced by the classic, sequenced electronic disco of Italian songwriter, producer and soundtrack composer Giorgio Moroder. If 2022-2023 winds up as one of Moroder’s biggest years, that will have happened nearly by accident. Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer’s mega-box office winner “Top Gun: Maverick” used the composer’s “Danger Zone,” as the original film did. Then there is the fact that Beyoncé sampled his “I Feel Love” for “Summer Renaissance” as part of her 2022 album, “Renaissance.” He was rendered as a big-screen character with Sebastian Maniscalco’s cartoonish portrayal of Moroder in director-writer Timothy Scott Bogart’s “Spinning Gold” biopic (Variety’s Owen Gleiberman wrote that Maniscalco’s Moroder “sounds like a character out of Hogan’s Heroes'”). The Italian producer and composer who now lives in Los Angeles is better-represented in the new documentary on the life of his old friend, HBO Max’s “Love to You Love You, Donna Summer.”

Donna Summer fans might wish for a more comprehensive documentary bio than HBO’s Love to Love You, Donna Summer (★★★★★), but it’s hard to imagine a more intimate portrait of the woman, artist, mother, and hit-making Queen of Disco than this fascinating music-filled odyssey.Co-directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams and actress-director Brooklyn Sudano, the middle of Summer’s three daughters, Love to Love You is framed as the family’s attempt to, as Brooklyn puts it, “figure out the many pieces of who Mom really was.”Summer, who succumbed to lung cancer in May 2012, provides the filmmakers key pieces to the puzzle by way of her songs and performances, recorded interviews, and footage she shot herself with her treasured Sony movie camera.At the height of her ’70s fame as pop’s First Lady of Love, Summer bought the camera because she loved making movies — and to entertain herself and the crew while on tour, according to her sister Mary Ellen, who sang backup. The video skits and home movies reveal the singer to be an unapologetic goofball, far from the gyrating diva of so-called Sex Rock that her label Casablanca Records was selling.Sex siren was merely a role she played, Summer explains in an interview voiceover.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Spinning Gold,” a sketchy but adoring if not outright devotional biopic about Neil Bogart, the upstart ’70s music-industry mogul who founded Casablanca Records, there’s a pivotal moment that spins around the story of how Bogart, at a party he was throwing, played the 3-minute-and-20-second single version of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” He played it over and over again because his guests kept asking for it. That’s when the lightbulb went on. Bogart realized that the song needed to be longer, much longer — long enough to have sex to. (It ended up being 16 minutes and 50 seconds.) This is a rather famous anecdote (in the new documentary “Love to Love You, Donna Summer,” which just premiered at SXSW, there’s a clip of Bogart telling it on a talk show). So we assume that we’re going to see Bogart meet with Giorgio Moroder, the song’s composer and producer, and change music history.

Broadway stars and Tony-nominated actors Phillipa Soo and Jeremy Jordan both have new movies coming out soon!

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor 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.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor The entertainment business is filled with polymaths, but this week’s “Strictly Business” podcast guest, Evan Bogart, is a rarity even by its standards: He’s a songwriter of hits for Beyonce, Rihanna, Lizzo and others; owner of the large publishing company Seeker Music; chair of the Recording Academy’s new songwriters and composers wing; and not least, son of the late, legendary Neil Bogart, founder of the 1970s powerhouse Casablanca Records, which brought the world Kiss, Donna Summer, Parliament-Funkadelic and the Village People. Neil is the subject of “Spinning Gold,” a biopic directed and written by Evan’s older brother Tim, for which Evan is executive music producer, and which comes out March 31.

EXCLUSIVE: One notable title up for sale we’re hearing about at the European Film Market is Timothy Scott Bogart’s pop Romeo & Juliet musical, Verona starring Clara Rugaard, Jamie Ward, Rebel Wilson, Rupert Everett, Jason Isaacs and Derek Jacobi.

The official trailer for Spinning Gold has dropped and it explores the rise of Neil Bogart as the founder of Casablanca Records. Watch the preview in the video posted above.

EXCLUSIVE: Timothy Scott Bogart’s movie Spinning Gold about his music producer father, Neil Bogart, and the iconic label he built, Casablanca Records, will hit theaters on Friday, March 31, 2023.

Manori Ravindran International Editor“Spinning Gold” director Timothy Scott Bogart has set up his next projects on the heels of his musical biopic about his father, Casablanca Records founder Neil Bogart.Bogart will produce the semi-autobiographical feature “North Star” from Oscar nominee Jim Sheridan (“My Left Foot,” “In the Name of the Father”), which tells the story of the director’s early life in Northern Ireland. U2 musicians Bono and The Edge are in discussions to compose original music for the film, Variety can reveal.Meanwhile, Bogart will also write and direct the modern pop-music driven, 1191-set “Marian,” which charts the love story of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, with music from Grammy-winning songwriter Evan Bogart.

Shirley Halperin Executive Editor, MusicThe story of Casablanca Records has been told by many — in books, articles and by the larger-than-life characters who lived through the salad days of mid- to late-1970s rock and disco music. Its ascent as a hit factory — home to KISS, Donna Summer, the Village People and Parliament Funkadelic — was short and swift and substantial.Founded in 1974 by Neil Bogart, who’d had limited success as a record man at Buddha Records, a sublabel of MGM which had signed Gladys Knight and the Pips and the Ohio Express, Casablanca had the reputation of a place of excess.

Manori Ravindran International EditorKISS takes the stage in the first exclusive clip to emerge from hotly anticipated musical biopic “Spinning Gold.”The long-gestating movie about Casablanca Records founder Neil Bogart — directed by his son Tim Bogart and now in post-production — has finally landed, and is being screened to buyers at the Cannes Film Festival market this week.Founded in 1974 by Neil Bogart, Casablanca Records was the home to KISS, Donna Summer, the Village People and Parliament Funkadelic, among others. The company contributed the first smash extended single to clubs and radio stations all over the world with Summer’s 17-minute 1975 banger “Love to Love You,” and released 289 albums from more than 140 artists.