The Long Road to ‘Spinning Gold’: Why It Took Three Decades to Bring the Story of Six Decadent Disco Years to the Screen

variety.com:

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.

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll was the mantra of the day, and certainly so for the record company that contributed the first smash extended single to clubs and radio stations all over the world — Summer’s 17-minute “Love to Love You,” produced by Giorgio Moroder and first released in 1975.

As legend has it: the record was played at one of Bogart’s wild Hollywood parties, where it unintentionally repeated over and over again until the host realized that, at 17 minutes, the song was just long enough to soundtrack the pre-AIDS sex everyone was having — and likely coincided with the timespan of their cocaine high.Tim Bogart, one of Neil’s sons alongside hit songwriter Evan Bogart (Rihanna’s “SOS,” Beyonce’s “Halo”), has given a lot of thought to the brief amount of time his dad was on this earth (the elder Bogart died in 1982 of cancer, by which time disco had gone out of fashion), and has worked diligently to preserve the story in the form of a screenplay.“Spinning Gold” was first conceived in 1990 and, after many drafts, multiple castings and a decades-long search for the right director (the road ultimately led to Tim), is finally a.