Motley Crue Set ‘The Dirt’ Premiere Date
Mötley Crüe’s seemingly unfilmable group autobiography, The Dirt, will finally come out as a biopic via Netflix next spring. Frontman Vince Neil shared the news with an effusively excited, exclamation-point–studded tweet: “Wow!!! Just left Netflix offices. Just saw The Dirt movie!! Fuckin’ awesome!! Can’t wait for everyone to see it! Released March 22!! Yea!!!” A representative for Netflix confirmed the date to Rolling Stone.
The band released The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, co-written by Neil Strauss, in 2001. It contains some of the grittiest, raunchiest, supposedly true stories recorded, with scenes depicting the abuse of drugs, alcohol and groupies as the “Shout at the Devil” rockers somehow survived the Eighties and a low commercial period in the Nineties. Plans for a film version have been in the works since 2006, originally with Seinfeld writer Larry Charles slated to direct. Filmmaker Jeff Tremaine (Bad Grandpa, Jackass) signed on in 2013 and helmed the shooting of the film, produced by the band, earlier this year.
The cast features Machine Gun Kelly playing Tommy Lee, Douglas Booth (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) as Nikki Sixx, Iwan Reheon (Game of Thrones’ Ramsay Bolton) as Mick Mars and Daniel Webber (11.22.63’s Lee Harvey Oswald) as Vince Neil. It also features depictions of Ozzy Osbourne, Heather Locklear and Crüe manager Doc McGhee.
In a 2015 Rolling Stone interview, when Mötley Crüe were in the midst of their final tour, Lee offered up what fans should expect from the picture. “Nikki and I went to a table read and it was so fucking surreal,” he said. “Especially when the movie opens like that, you go, ‘Oh, my God, if it opens like this, this is fuckin’ nuts.’ That was really a trip. [Director] Jeff Tremaine’s vision is to … make it as real as possible. He’s really detail-oriented. He’s like, it’s going to be down to the cars you see on the street, the telephones from the Eighties, the lights. The outfits. You’re going to feel like you’re in that time period, and he wanted a lot of stuff. There will be a lot of P.O.V. stuff where you’ll be in Vince’s head, in Nikki’s head while it was going down.”
In that same interview, the band fielded a question about which scene from The Dirt they’re most looking forward to seeing on the big screen. They made a typically licentious choice:
Nikki Sixx: The “squirting” scene in the opening.
Vince Neil: I don’t know how they’re gonna do that, freeze frame?
Sixx: You’re supposed to freeze-frame cum? Is it cum? We’ve never really understood what squirting really is.
Tommy Lee: It’s pee.
Sixx: It’s pee. OK. So we’ll freeze-frame pee like Goodfellas.
Neil: Kind of like The Matrix.
Sixx: We’ll have narration over it. That’s what I’m looking for. Even our producers go, “We’re really going to try to put this in the film, but we doubt it will make it.”