Newswire Today in music movie news: Brian Epstein gets the biopic treatment, Soul Train chugs to the big screen

by Nathan Rabin August 26, 2009

According to Variety, Soul Train, the black music institution that launched countless careers and inspired countless jokes and homages, will be hitting the big screen with the help of Dead Presidents screenwriter Malcolm Spellman and will be set in the 80s. Longtime host Don Cornelius will produce, which invites (but apparently does not beg) the question: what actor has the manic energy and raw charisma to portray Cornelius? Busta Rhymes? A young Stephen Baldwin?

According to Spellman, the film will center on a fictional Soul Train tour and a rough-hewn street dancer who's a "serious popper, with street edge, and he wants to get on that tour, with the hottest of the hot." Wow, that sounds like every half-assed dancesploitation movie ever, with some cheap nostalgia thrown in for good measure.

In other music movie news I lovingly stole from Variety Beatles manager Brian Epstein will soon receive the biopic treatment. Epstein's relationship with John Lennon was previously the subject of the well-regarded independent film The Hours And The Times. Epstein died of a drug overdose at 32 and led quite a sad, historic and eventful life but was he a serious popper, with street edge, who wanted to dance with the hottest of the hot? We don't think so, though we remain, as always, cautiously optimistic.

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