Dogmatic

The Pulse of Radio reports that film director Larry Charles has spoken out about his involvement in the biographical Mötley Crüe film The Dirt, which was originally set to be produced through MTV Films/Paramount Studios but is no longer on the company’s slate. Charles, who directed many episodes of ‘Seinfeld’ as well as the movies ‘Borat’ and the new Bill Maher documentary ‘Religulous’, said, “The Mötley Crüe thing I was really into and I did a lot of work on it…but it was at MTV Films which then got swallowed by Paramount Vantage which then got swallowed by Paramount. All those people were gone that developed it and it got put to the side, so I don’t know what’s going to happen to it.”

Charles added that he thought the film “had to be an NC-17 (no one under 17 admitted) movie, and I thought, ‘Well that would be ballsy to do. When was the last time they had a mainstream NC-17 movie?’ That’d be a good idea.”

Interestingly, Charles is not a fan of the Crüe, saying that the memoir the film was supposed to be based on was “so much better than they deserve, the book, because Mötley Crüe is a crappy band but (author Neil Strauss) wrote a really epic book about them. It’s really fascinating.”

The director also said that the “hardcore” nature of the band’s history might have affected its chances as a movie, explaining, “They’ve killed people, they’ve hurt people, they’ve crippled people, they’ve done all kinds of crazy things. You’d have to show that for real and I think there was a little bit of reticence about doing that ultimately.”

A deal to bring the 2001 memoir to the screen was first announced in 2006 but has since gone nowhere. Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx told Reuters that MTV was “not the right partner.”