Brett Ratner Says I Want My MTV

Tower Heist filmmaker developing a movie about the origins of MTV at Sony.

Brett Ratner gets an awful lot of stick from around the film blogging sphere but the truth is, it's mainly because he finds himself attached to big screen properties he has no right being anywhere near. The truth is he is a capable filmmaker (and very successful producer) in the right genre and he can deliver decent movies when the material matches his sensibilities. We saw that with his ensemble comedy Tower Heist recently that was cast extremely well and was a modest, light-hearted narrative more ripe for Ratner than him trying to adapt an X-Men movie or something. So when we hear in Variety that Ratner is teaming up with Sony to bring an origin movie about MTV to the big screen, we again get the feeling of the right person working on the right material. Sony and Ratner's Rat Entertainment are close to a deal that will allow them to develop "I Want My MTV", a movie based on the highly buzzed non-fiction book "I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music" from music journo's Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum that was released last October and chronicles the early days of the groundbreaking music channel that changed music and television scene forever in the 80's and early 90s'. The book is said to go into much of the shady backroom dealings that were made to get the channel off the ground, how the highly ambitious plan to bring music to tv was birthed and how its success rose through the ranks of pop culture. This is the world Ratner very much lived through and during his music video career at the very end of MTV's last heydey he directed videos for Mariah Carey, P.Diddy, LL Cool J and the Wu-Tang Clan and others. At this point Ratner is only producing but if Jody Lambert's (People Like Us) script turns out as well as is hoped, we imagine he will direct it too. For Sony, they have been desperate for the past year to try and match the success of The Social Network and the origins of MTV is just the latest in a line of picks-up involving the beginnings of popular brands that also includes plans to develop a Steve Jobs biopic to film later this year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46idQ5USX18
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Matt Holmes is the co-founder of What Culture, formerly known as Obsessed With Film. He has been blogging about pop culture and entertainment since 2006 and has written over 10,000 articles.