Better Call Saul producer to make male stripper drama based on The Chippendales
Gordon Smith is swapping one moral vacuum for another, after new drama announcement.
The drug-fuelled, homicidal world of New York City’s male strippers’ circuit in the 1980s is getting dramatised for Sony Pictures Television by Better Call Saul executive producer Gordon Smith.
Smith will write the series based on the book Master of Ceremonies: A True Story of Love, Murder, Roller Skates and The Chippendales, by David Henry Sterry, and the premise promises to be as insane a world as he’s crafted while writing for both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad.
According to Deadline, Sterry was MC at the world infamous Chippendales strip club at a time when New York was in the grip of cocaine psychosis, "greed is good" and absolutely anything went. His book is a memoir detailing exactly how crazy things got at The Chippendales after it transformed from an altar of female wish fulfilment and decadent fun into a nightmarish world of seedy drug dealing and, ultimately, cold blooded murder.
Smith’s adaptation will be a semi-fictionalised account of the story that actually started in Los Angeles in the late ‘70s when a gas station owner, Somen Banerjee, and attorney, Bruce Nahin, bought a nightclub and hit on the unique idea of having male dancers.
Quite how The Chippendales ended up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and how things descended into drug distribution and homicide will be part of the story.
Emmy-nominated writer Smith began working as a production assistant on season three of Breaking Bad and he has advanced up the ranks to be executive producer for the final season of Better Call Saul.
RadioTimes.com reported in April that the final season of Better Call Saul would not premiere on Netflix until the middle of 2021, at the earliest, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Fans of the increasingly excellent Breaking Bad prequel will undoubtedly want to see what Smith does next when he turns his focus onto the morally dubious world of male stripping.
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