Martin Scorsese, Terence Winter, and Mick Jagger working on their own '70s-era music drama for HBO

By Sean O'Neal | October 20, 2011 | 8:05pm

Aux Features TV

First reported more than a year ago, Boardwalk Empire buddies Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter are re-teaming to delve into an equally seamy world of backroom deals, substance abuse, and nightly stripper parties with an HBO drama about the music industry—this based on an original idea from Mick Jagger, who has maybe heard about some of that stuff. However, while their collective brainchild was initially pitched as a decade-spanning look at two friends as they navigated the history of music from early R&B through the rise of hip-hop—and was aptly titled History Of Music—the team now seems to have narrowed its focus to just one man in the 1970s, with Winter crafting an as-yet-untitled script about “a cocaine-fueled record executive” in New York who’s at the center of the 1977 nexus of the disco, punk, and rap scenes.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the network is “very hot” on the pitch, which puts them in good company: Stories about the music industry before all the sex and drugs got downloaded out of it are suddenly everywhere, as the past year alone has seen the announcement of Showtime’s Vinyl (about the good old days when A&R stood for “Ass & Recreational drugs”), Fox’s 1980s-set music industry drama Full Nelson, the Justin Timberlake-starring feature Spinning Gold (about ’70s-era super-producer Neil Bogart), and even HBO’s very own A Visit From The Goon Squad. So, anticipating the trends of 30 years from now, we’re currently prepping our own pitch set in the music industry of the ’00s, in which an Ambien-addled record executive frets over how many exclamation points to include in his email press releases in between involuntary crying jags.