Giorgio Moroder Discusses His Legacy With Donna Summer, as New Films Recall Their Legendary Collaboration
variety.comA.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.” One of 1970s disco’s primary architects, an provocative influence on ’80s new wave (Blondie’s “Call Me”) and the man behind that era’s moodiest electronic-based soundtracks (“Midnight Express”), Moroder, while working in Munich, crafted the sensualist swirl of 1975’s “Love To Love You Baby” and the syncopated synthetic still-life of 1977’s “I Feel Love” for his young discovery, Donna Summer.
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