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Netflix is reportedly fast-tracking a deal for the first official Kiss biopic, with the full cooperation of co-founders Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons. Although still unannounced officially, Deadline reported the film, titled, Shout It Out Loud, will be directed by Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Ronning — best known for Kon-Tiki, Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil, and Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. The script will be written by Ole Sanders.
Deadline posted about the film: “The band’s concert-arena anthems will be a big part of this, but the film will focus on that duo going back to when they were two misfit kids from Queens who formed an unlikely friendship, starting Kiss after enlisting guitarist Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss. Trying to set themselves apart from the ‘hair’ bands of the day, they accented their power chords and pyrotechnics with makeup. At heart, their formative story is in the vein of The Commitments, if that Irish soul band employed makeup and spiked heels.”
Gene Simmons told us that a Kiss concert provides everything that good entertainment should: “It’s uplifting, there’s nothing negative — we don’t do political commentary. There are enough problems in the world without guys that wear more makeup and higher heels than your mom waxing poetic and prolific on all sorts of issues. They shouldn’t. We make you forget about the traffic jam, and the fight you had with your girlfriend, and, like all the other things, just ‘magic time’ — ‘electric church.’”
When we last caught up with Paul Stanley, he explained that if a fan shells out their hard earned cash to see Kiss in concert, they’re getting a massive show by seasoned vets who know exactly what it takes to deliver the goods — be it in an open air stadium or a smoke-filled, hole in the wall club: “There’s absolutely no substitute for working your way up. Bands today that are starting out — they don’t have a clue. Most of these bands go from obscurity to selling a million albums, two million albums — they couldn’t entertain a phone booth and that’s why (laughter) they don’t sell tickets. You learn the craft by doing it. You start in the clubs, you work your way up to being third on a bill in an auditorium, then you get to headlining there, then you get to work your way into arenas. By the time you’re in arenas, you damn well know how to do it.”