Spinning Gold: A Complicated Music Figure, Through a Filmmaker Son's Upbeat Prism
By Karen Gordon
Rating: C
In a music industry full of larger-than-life characters, Casablanca Records’ late Neil Bogart stood out. He was a successful record industry executive, and a colourful character whose career spanned several key decades in 20th century pop music.
He ran several successful independent record companies, sold more than 200 million records, launching the careers of legacy artists like Bill Withers, Kiss, and Donna Summer. Tragically, he died of cancer in 1982 at age 39, too young for someone who lived with such gusto. It perhaps accounts for the reason he isn’t nearly as well remembered as he should be.
With the best of intentions, writer/director Timothy Scott Bogart – Neil’s son - has attempted to remedy that, with the loving biopic Spinning Gold (with his brother Evan making it a family affair as an Executive Music Producer).
Spinning Gold is ambitious: it aims to paint a picture of this influential character, his romantic life and the trajectory of his career as he rose through the music industry - apparently on an abundance of talent and an ability to market the heck out of artists and records.
Unfortunately, love and enthusiasm doesn’t automatically add up to a good movie. The ideas here are well thought through, but the execution is tonally wonky, at times feeling like a stage musical translated to the screen. At other times, it comes across like a Hallmark movie. At two hours and 17 minutes, it’s simultaneously too much and not enough.
We get a sense of where we’re going from the opening scene. It’s a fantasy sequence that has Jeremy Jordan, as Neil Bogart, dancing into a church service led by Reverend Edwin Hawkins, joining the choir as they sing Oh Happy Day, before breaking away to persuade Hawkins to sign a record deal by opening a briefcase full of money.
This is clearly going to be an upbeat movie, about a man so full of confidence, positivity and moxie, that nothing will stop him. In the next scene, Bogart (Jordan) breaks the fourth wall, and talks directly to us. It’s a technique that is used throughout the film. As well he narrates, moving the story along, giving us perspective and context.
He also warns us that some of what he’s going to show us is true, and some exaggerated truth.
From there we go to an important date in Bogart’s career, February 18th, 1974, when he and his creative team are about to launch Casablanca Records in Los Angeles with a huge party. featuring a then unknown, gimmicky East Coast band called Kiss. The party is a disaster, and Casablanca starts its life off in serious debt, but as happens repeatedly through the film nothing seems to dim Bogart’s enthusiasm or belief in himself and his artist.
He continues to sign artists and take risks. He pairs up an Italian producer named Giorgio Moroder (Sebastian Maniscalco), and an American singer living in Germany named LaDonna Gaines (Tayla Parx), called Love to Love You Baby. Bogart renames her Donna Summer, gives her a sex symbol image, and ‘70s pop culture is forever altered.
Spinning Gold moves us back in time to tackle Bogart’s back story: He was a poor kid, who grew up in the projects of Brooklyn, with a loving father (Jason Isaac) who had a shady side. Bogart, born Neil Bogatz, was a born entertainer who used those skills to break into the music industry. The film shows him becoming the General Manager of Buddha Records, a New York based record label that became a hit machine under his watch. It also connected him to a creative and support team that he took with him when he founded Casablanca Records.
Spinning Gold mixes his career accomplishments, his ability to spot talent and to make artists deals they couldn’t refuse, with his personal life. His first wife Beth (Michelle Monaghan), having kids, and being a family man, and then cheating on his wife when he falls in love with the woman who would become his second wife, Joyce (Lyndsy Fonseca), who was the manager of KISS.
It also deals with some of his negatives, the aforementioned cheating, what appears to be payola, and, for a while, a cocaine habit.
Always we see Bogart as a confident, high energy guy who can do everything, strutting into meetings with artists, working on song arrangements. He meets with record executives, mob types who help finance his business and exact revenge when he can’t pay.
Some of what we see seems like creative licence. The film has Bogart inventing the KISS Army, and being in the studio in Germany while Donna Summer re-recorded the long version of Love to Love You Baby, coaxing the sexy groans out of the singer.
There’s a lot of music in Spinning Gold, which isn’t surprising. But instead of using the original recordings, or avoiding them altogether, the songs are sung by the actors playing the various musicians. They often don’t sound enough like the original artist, and the difference is jarring.
Jordan as Bogart commits to the role, which, considering he’s in every scene and also narrating, is no small thing. But given the scope of the movie, in terms of time and the relationships, there’s surprisingly little character development. After a while Bogart, cocky, confident, even joyful starts to feel more like a caricature than a character.
Upbeat moxie has its limits.
There are a series of relationships, personal and professional, and Jordan conveys that Bogart was, for all his hustle, also a family man with a big heart. But there’s very little feeling of connection between the characters, the dialogue devolving into a series of speeches.
The movie also has a tone issue, sometimes too kinetic, never stopping to take a breath. It often plays like a stage musical, where subtleties are few.
That the writer/director Bogart the younger, wanted to make a loving tribute to a father he barely had a chance to know, is palpable and touching.
But for all the time taken and energy spent, the most effective homage to Neil Bogart comes over the credits, with a series of family pictures and videos, and clips of interviews where you can see the charisma and joyfulness of the real Neil Bogart.
Spinning Gold. Written and directed by Timothy Scott Bogart, starring Jeremy Jordan, Jason Isaac, Michelle Monaghan, Lynsey Fonseca. Opens in theatres March 31