Andrew "Dice" Clay Cosplays as Alfred Molina in Boogie Nights in the Strangely Underwhelming Pilot for Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger's Vinyl
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I recently finished writing my first novel. But before I completed a whole book, my brain was a graveyard of book ideas, both fiction and nonfiction, that I thought long and hard about but never even began or that did not make it beyond the scattered notes stage.
One of these never-realized book ideas was a novel inspired by the dramatic rise and fall of Casablanca Records, the disco powerhouse founded by the wildly charismatic Neil Bogart and his considerably less magnetic cousin Larry Harris.
I was inspired by Harris’ memoir and other books that I had read about Casablanca, which was synonymous with disco thanks to acts like Donna Summer and the Village People but also introduced the world to Kiss and signed such artists of note as Cher, Parliament, and T. Rex.
My novel would have taken place at the very end of the colorful label’s coke and hype-fueled existence when the drugs weren’t working anymore, and everything was falling apart.
Fortunately or unfortunately, all of the work that I did on that novel occurred in my brain, where it is, at best, an exceedingly fuzzy memory.
I was not the only person fascinated by this period in American history and American pop culture. In 2016, the auspicious team of Mick Jagger (of the rock and roll band The Rolling Stones), Martin Scorsese (a filmmaker of note), Terence Winter (a prolific Sopranos writer who created Boardwalk Empire), and Rich Cohen created Vinyl.
It’s an ambitious and audacious drama/dark comedy about a Neil Bogart-like record executive, Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale), in the process of selling his struggling record label to Polygram.
Vinyl is deeply committed to the cliches and conventions of the era, so our anti-hero is introduced on the hunt for some sugar. That’s slang for cocaine for all you squares! Richie subversively chops up what he refers to as Bolivian dancing dust with a business card given to him by a detective.
His fancy car (it even has a phone, quite the luxury in 1973) is overrun by ecstatic kids in a terrible hurry to the Mercer Arts Center so that they can worship the New York Dolls in their feral, feline prime.
To Richie, these kids are like space aliens tuned into a frequency that only they understand. It’s a benign riot as The Kids flock to an androgynous glam band that played a massive role in the development of punk.
The famous line about the New York Dolls is that not many people saw them perform live, but everyone who did formed a seminal punk or alternative band.
All it takes is watching, in a stoned trance, David Johannsen and the rest of the Dolls perform “Personality Crisis” for Richie to sense, intuitively, that the band is hot, hot, hot, and not just for busters and poindexters: they appealed to everyone, which is why they sold between forty and sixty albums during their prime.
That’s the thing about Richie: he just fucking gets it. He has a sixth sense for spotting future superstars, or at least artists that would be important for critics and musicians, like The New York Dolls.
I wish this scene had been followed by one where Richie goes next door, where Big Star is playing their first show, and then time-travels to the mid-1960s so he could see The Velvet Underground’s first shows.
But the most annoying bit of name-dropping finds Richie’s secretary telling him that Lester Bangs returned his call.
He’s talking about THE Lester Bangs. The famous one! From Almost Famous! And he’s totally mentioned in the Vinyl pilot. I can only imagine how happy that must make his ghost.
Later, Richie listens to twenty seconds of Abba and proclaims that they’ll be filling football stadiums. Of course, Bogart had an uncanny knack for spotting and developing talent, but Richie rampages through Vinyl like a coked-up Forrest Gump, stumbling through musical history when he’s not making it.
In a line all too representative of the script, Richie brags about being ridiculously stinking fucking rich and possessing a “golden ear, silver tongue, and a pair of brass balls.”
He then concedes, unnecessarily, as we can assume that if he was involved in the music business in the 1970s and 1980s was hooked on cocaine, “the problem became my nose, and everything that I put up it.”
He really likes this music! Also, taking cocaine.
In the 1970s, the record and radio business were essentially criminal enterprises ruled by payola, cocaine, and thuggish record owners with mob ties. Vinyl has a laissez-faire attitude towards the rampant criminality that dominated 1970s radio.
Of course, you don’t need to be Nostradamus to know that Led Zeppelin was going places. The Polygram deal is contingent on the British superstars signing to Richie’s label.
This is complicated by Robert Plant’s insistence that Richie and his label are doing to him what he’s about to do to some “birds” waiting in the wings: fuck them.
The band’s manager, Peter Grant, proves to be a fierce, easily enraged negotiator, but Richie has a way of managing the emotions of the rock elite, which is crucial to his success.
We shuffle back in time between the present and a past where Richie worked at a label where he discovers ferociously talented blues singer and guitar player Lester Grimes (Ato Essandoh).
Richie believes in Lester and his music, but his colleagues want him to sell out by changing his name to Little Jimmy Little and performing novelty songs instead of songs that address the agony of existence.
It’s an unusually pure Faustian bargain that leads almost instantly to tragedy when a mobbed-up goon and his henchmen beat Lester nearly to death to keep him from pursuing a new direction musically or disobeying their orders.
Richie has to put up with the egos and insecurities of his artists but also industry bigwigs like Buck Rodgers (Andrew “Dice” Clay), a radio station owner with scraggly hair, a silver and black fu Manchu and all of the angry, coked-up energy in the world.
Buck is a monster of id and ego, but because he controls what gets played on his stations, he’s as powerful as he is morally repulsive.
He’s powerful enough to get Richie to visit him during the tail end of what appears to be a days-long coke binge. He’s coked out of his mind, waving around a gun and making Richie uncomfortable with his weird air of sexual aggression.
If you’ve seen Boogie Nights, then you’ve already seen this scene. It’s so famous and iconic that you’d think TV and movie writers would avoid stealing from it out of a justly warranted fear of getting caught.
The scene’s notoriety also makes it irresistible to writers with a little creative larceny in their souls.
Only instead of Alfred Molina delivering one of the all-time great one-scene performances as a rich, gun-loving lunatic discoursing incoherently about pop culture, we have Clay devouring scenery as the sleaziest man in the sleaziest industry in the sleaziest decade.
I like Clay as a character actor, generally, but he’s so over the top that when he’s brutally murdered, it feels like a rough form of justice.
I would never question Scorsese’s instincts or judgment, but I wonder why he thought that he could match or even top the legendary Alfred Molina scene by replacing the revered thespian with a moonlighting stand-up comedian best known for amusing the ignorant rabble with filthy nursery rhymes.
Vinyl feels like a Frankenstein’s Monster made up of much better movies, many directed by the man who does some of his all-time worst work here. Scorsese is reduced to doing a lukewarm imitation of himself. Vinyl feels like one of many underwhelming Scorsese knockoffs, except that it’s helmed the real thing.
The magic that Scorsese brought to his many cinematic masterpieces and the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Bad” is missing here.
I was surprised that I didn’t like the feature-length pilot for Vinyl because Scorsese is one of my favorite filmmakers. He’s more than that: he is a God of cinema.
Vinyl recalls Scorsese masterpieces like Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wolf Street enough to suffer by comparison.
I was underwhelmed by the first episode of Vinyl but remain cautiously optimistic that the show will improve, if only because the subsequent episodes have half as much time to fill as the 113-minute pilot.
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