Warner Bros. is reportedly chasing Steve Carell to play songwriter-turned-humble-realtor Dennis Lambert, the 11-time Grammy-nominated songwriter who penned hits for The Four Tops, The Commodores, Player, and Glen Campbell (among many others) before retiring—and the guy who will go down in history for one of the worst/greatest songs ever committed to wax, Starship’s “We Built This City.”
Lambert spent more than 30 years in the business as an in-demand producer and composer, but released only one album of his own, 1972’s Bags And Things. It was all but ignored everywhere but in the Philippines, where he became an unlikely star. At the age of 60, many years after Lambert had retired from the music business to sell homes in Florida, a Filipino promoter convinced him to do a five-date tour over there, which was subsequently filmed for the festival sleeper hit documentary Of All The Things, directed by Lambert’s son.
While the documentary still doesn’t have a distributor, Warner Bros. reportedly bought up the rights to remake it, with an eye on turning it into a comedy for Carell, whose knack for playing awkward, amiable befuddlement should come in very handy. (And as Vulture points out, we’ve heard Carell sing before, both in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and in Nathan Rabin’s favoritest movie ever, Dan In Real Life, so hiring him on to play a middling pop singer isn’t completely out of left field.) Here’s a clip from Of All Things to show you what he’d be working with.
And you know what? Fuck it, here's the video for "We Built This City," just because. Let's all get knee-deep in the hoopla today.