The unusual new HBO series “Vinyl” deserved an unusual panel at press tour Thursday and certainly got it. One one side of the ballroom at the Pasadena hotel was the giant projected head of co-executive producer Mick Jagger, live from the English countryside, the birds and bugs buzzing behind him.
On the other side of the room the giant head of director Martin Scorsese was projected live via satellite from New York, where he appeared to be fighting off a late afternoon nap.
In between were three esteemed actors from the series — Bobby Cannavale, Olivia Wilde and Ray Romano — who were flown in for the event and were receiving largely no questions. Not to mention the writer and show runner Terrence Winters, who has been behind so many great films.
Clearly, the novelty of Jagger as a producer meant most questions went to him, including mine, about his role.
“The genesis of this really was that I had an idea years ago that I took to Marty and asked him what he thought, and we tried to develop it as a movie. And we developed it and developed it. We wrote scripts. And it was a very sprawling idea. And when TV series came online and started to become interesting, respectable, money making, we decided to make a TV series of it,” Jagger said.
But Winter had a more specifics: “In 1996, Mick approached Marty about doing a film. They did several versions of the film. I came on board in 2008 to continue to work on the film with them. In 2009, the economy collapsed, and it was clear that nobody was going to make a three hour, 40 year spanning, epic period piece in the music business. So we were back to square one.
“The idea came,” he said, “what about a TV series? We needed to then take what was a 40 year story and park it in one particular era. Together, we decided that 1973 was the most interesting time period. We reinvented the story, came up with a new story for the pilot in what would be the arc of season one.
“I wrote that pilot in 2011. We were doing ‘Boardwalk Empire’ at the time. It took another couple of years to get it shot and to where I was available to run the show, and that’s where we are today.”
Nineteen seventy three was a notable year in the life of Scorsese too: It was when he made his first big film “Mean Streets,” that so well used rock music.
For that reason, “this is something that’s very natural to me, and it’s very close to my heart,” Scorsese says.
“Vinyl” premieres Feb. 14 on HBO.