‘I Want My MTV’: NEON & ‘Patti Cake$’ Director Geremy Jasper Team For Film About Beloved Music Video Channel

NEON and filmmaker Geremy Jasper are teaming up for a new film that is expected to explore the early days of the music video channel MTV during the 1980s. Long before their serious pivot to reality television in the 1990s and 2000s, which started to overshadow the music format that had birthed the company. The film is based on the book “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution,” authored by Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks.

Deadline revealed the latest update on “I Want My MTV” after decades of development, as Jasper will co-write the script with Jim Hecht of the HBO Max sports series “Winning Time,” which explored the Magic Johnson era of the Los Angeles Lakers. Adding that NEON secured the package after a bidding war.

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An official logline for the book via Amazon:

“I Want My MTV” tells the story of the first decade of MTV, the golden era when MTV’s programming was all videos, all the time, and kids watched religiously to see their favorite bands, learn about new music, and have something to talk about at parties. From its start in 1981 with a small cache of videos by mostly unknown British new wave acts to the launch of the reality-television craze with “The Real World” in 1992, MTV grew into a tastemaker, a career maker, and a mammoth business. Featuring interviews with nearly four hundred artists, directors, VJs, and television and music executives, I Want My MTV is a testament to the channel that changed popular culture forever.

Directors James Ponsoldt and Brett Ratner had been previously circling “I Want My MTV” as Jasper is the latest filmmaker to attach themself to the project. Jasper is best known for the music-driven films such as the rapper drama “Patti Cake$” and the sci-fi fantasy pic “Odessa,” starring Sadie Sink (“Stranger Things,” “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”).

MTV was instrumental in popularizing music videos in the 1980s (alongside MuchMusic, Top Of The Pops and other international music video channels) until the network started pumping a lot of airtime and money into shows like “Beavis & Butthead,” “The Real World,” “The Osbornes,” “Cribs,” “The Jersey Shore, “Jackass,” “Ridiculousness,” and other scripted or reality-based shows that would end up subverting the audience to expect more traditional TV programming than showcasing the latest music videos, as eyeballs started being pushed over to internet sources and YouTube.

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The phrase “I Want My MTV,” of course, comes from The Dire Straits‘ song “Money For Nothing,” the beloved music video about product consumption that used cutting-edge CGI animation (for the time, mind you) and promoted the mega-popular music video channel (a meta angle of the video).