CBGB to be Remembered in Film

New York City’s once famous rock club CBGB is getting some much deserved recognition. According to Billboard.com, a film is in the works that will chronicle the club’s years 1974 to 1976, during the “birth of punk rock.”

The film’s producers are Brad Rosenberger, Randall Miller, Jody Savin and Lisa Kristal Burgman, daughter of the late Hilly Kristal, who owned the club. Tentatively titled simply CBGB, the film will focus on the period when the Bowery club housed acts like Television, the Ramones, the Talking Heads and Patti Smith. Savin will direct the film herself and is currently writing the script with Miller.

Thanks to a dispute between the club and the Bowery Residents’ Committee, CBGB closed its doors at 315 Bowery on October 15, 2006, after spending over 30 years as a neighborhood staple. The final week consisted of concerts by Bad Brains, The Dictators and an acoustic set by Blondie. Patti Smith played the final night on October 15. Kristal died in 2007 from lung cancer.

Kristal’s original concept of the club was actually a far cry from the punk scene that emerged. Kristal was a trained violinist who originally opened the space for a more country-based audience—the space’s full name was “CBGB and OMFUG,” an abbreviation of “Country, Blue Grass, Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers.” The neighborhood, however, had different ideas.

“It was an old-fashioned salon in an awful part of New York where people could fail while they worked to find their voice,” Savin told Billboard. “He provided a voice to the disenfranchised. It’s a heroic and flawed story.”

Now, thanks to Burgman’s own connections, the production team is conducting interviews with artists about Kristal and his relationship with the musicians whose careers he nurtured. They are also hoping to secure key music rights thanks to Kristal’s closeness to the bands and plan to start filming directly after Miller and Savin have wrapped production on The Drummer, a biopic on Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson.

This article was originally published on AllMediaNY.com