Alex Winter or the guy best known as Bill S. Preston, from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, has announced his intentions to direct a feature-length film about Napster. The peer-to-peer file-sharing service that helped start the digital musical revolution (and create some dope sites to D/L music from) won't entirely be going The Social Network route, as it's planned to be a documentary. Why would this be worth watching?
Winter has the explanation, as he tells Deadline:
“The rise and fall of Napster and the birth of peer-to-peer file-sharing technology created by Shawn Fanning when he was a college student, changed music to movies, and made possible everything from Julian Assange, WikiLeaks to the iPod and Facebook. It became an expression of youth revolt, and contributed to a complete shift in how information, media and governments work. And it is a fascinating human story, where this 18-year-old kid invents a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, and brings it to the world six months later.”
Sounds like another tale about e-revolution, social change, but set to the headbanging sounds of Metallica is on the way. Winter doesn't just plan on the doc being some one-sided story about youths gone wild. He plans on giving Metallica's Lars Ulrich a soapbox to go off the handle, yet again, as he recounts the horror he experienced when he heard an unfinished product end up on the radio.
In the end, it'll be really fascinating to see how all the players, from Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker (played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network) to music industry execs and Metallica, feel about such an important cultural event that took place over a decade ago. We will keep you posted as more news develops.
[via Deadline]
