KISS' Gene Simmons Talks Movies, Tour, Cartoons

From:CDnow.com

Detroit Rock City isn't the last dramatic Kiss project we'll be seeing anytime soon. Gene Simmons says work has already begun on a follow-up to New Line Cinema's coming-of-age comedy, which opens Aug. 13. It'll be a more biographical Kiss feature penned by Wesley Strick (Lethal Weapon).

Simmons says he's also working on a Psycho Circus cartoon show for the Fox Kids Channel, planning a tour to begin in January, and working on a CBS movie-of-the-week called Rock and Roll All Nite. This last project is being penned by Jeff Arch, known for Sleepless in Seattle, and contains a similar theme.

"A guy and a girl go with two different groups to a Kiss concert in 1976," Simmons explains. "There's a moment when they see each other across the room, but they can't hear each other. And they get separated at the end of the concert. They go back to their normal lives and settle for lives that are just OK. But when Kiss announces a farewell tour years later, they have to go back, because maybe there's that special person there."

For now, fans will have to live with Detroit Rock City, a considerably less romantic film that follows four high school boys from Cleveland (Edward Furlong, Giuseppe Andrews, Sam Huntington, and James De Bello) on a mission to see Kiss play Detroit in 1978. The reunited original members of Kiss appear in the finale, as themselves. Their blood-gurgling performance of the movie's title song was filmed last December, after a local rock station filled Hamilton, Ontario's Copps Coliseum with 4,000 shrieking teen-agers in period costume.

"I felt, clearly, a lapse of time and space," says Simmons, who co-produced the film, "to look out and see all the afros and bell-bottoms. It was a time piece." This is not the first time Kiss has gotten a platform boot in Hollywood's door. In 1978, the band made a TV movie called Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, which was either brilliantly bad or just bad, depending on who you ask. Simmons, who turns 50 later this month, says that pushing Kiss into the mainstream media stems from a desire to have his band "mean all things to all people." "In fact, I'm very jealous of religion," he says. "If it were up to me, Kiss would be a religion. KISStianity -- it's got a ring to it, don't you think?" -- Corey Levitan