Let the words "American sitcom producer" conjure up a picture in your mind. Maybe you're thinking someone small, neurotic, over-articulate, slightly bullying, burdened by an education that makes them think they should really be aspiring to Chekhov.
Someone like Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, who forged George Costanza in his own image. Or Rob Long, Cheers's writer-producer and author of the excellent Conversations With My Agent.
Now, erase that image entirely and replace it with this: a big guy with a long perm, a face covered in white and black make-up, wearing a skin-tight glitter suit and platform boots, and spitting blood. Yes, the latest sitcom mastermind is none other than Gene Simmons, bass player and "The Demon" in KISS. Gene could be sitting back enjoying the big bucks from the latest reunion tours, and pondering the curious fact that his band are now more credible than they ever have been in their long history. After all, the present rock revival seemed to start when every fashionable girl in London was seen sporting tiny (ironic or sincere? Or both?) KISS T-shirts.
But Simmons, who has slipped in being a teacher, an actor and a manager along with becoming a rock god and sleeping with 4,000 women, is clearly a man who cannot rest. So he has managed to oversee a new half-hour comedy, one surprisingly set in the always squalid, back-stabbing and generally lowdown world of the music industry.
Smash, which will run on the US version of VH-1, is about a pop rapper - MC Hammer somehow seems to spring naturally to mind - whose moment of fame has slipped by, and who is now trying to hustle his way up the ladder again as a manager. Which is something Simmons knows about, because in one of the many weird turns his career has taken, he juggled being in America's most successful rock band with managing Liza Minelli.
In fact, Simmons's biography is packed with the unlikely. The man who became a hero to mildly rebellious mid-westerners was born Chaim Witz in Haifa, 1949, son of a Holocaust survivor. After his parents split in 1954, his mother took him to New York, where Chaim became Eugene Klein. He says he learnt English from watching Disney cartoons.
The myth has it that young Eugene considered becoming a rabbi before the urge to rock 'n' roll all night overcame him, but he actually qualified as a teacher and worked at Vogue before he and Paul Stanley cobbled together their overwrought fusion of Alice Cooper and British glam rock and a legend was born. The music definitely took third place to the image and the lifestyle.
Few people have made as much of an effort at being a true rock star as Simmons, especially when it came to the ladies. Simmons estimates that he has slept with at least 3,000 women, and probably more like 4,000 (if he started out when he was four years old or so, that works out at around 108 a year). Among his more notable partners are Cher, Diana Ross and soft-porn stalwart Shannon Tweed, with whom he has two children. Way back in 1978, he stole the show in KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park. His fledging acting career peaked in 1987 when he played Malak Al Rahaim, a ruthless Arab (no comment) terrorist in the deranged B-movie Wanted: Dead Or Alive. The film ends when bounty hunter Rutger Hauer finally tracks Simmons down, and sticks a grenade in his mouth. All he has to do to collect the money is hand Simmons over. Instead he pulls the pin, and the murdering Muslim has his head blown apart.
Possibly fearing he could never match that moment, Simmons has only made a couple of acting appearances since. Instead, he turned to producing, starting on familiar ground with last year's film Detroit Rock City, a comedy about kids in the 1970s trying to get to a KISS gig.
And while the sitcom could be interesting, it's the next Simmons project that could be the real winner: The Neil Bogart Story. Bogart (born Bogatz) was the boss of Casablanca records, home to KISS, the Village People and Donna Summer in the 1970s. Casablanca were the very embodiment of 1970s insanity. Cocaine on demand? You got it. A Benz for every last schmuck in the promotions department? Executives attacking each other with golf clubs? A lobby based on the oasis theme, complete with a genuine camel? Yes, yes and yes. And not content with running the most flamboyant record company around, Bogart talked PolyGram into letting him set up a film division, which came up with a predictable disco turkey Thank God It's Friday, but also funded Midnight Express (no surprise there either, actually). Bogart died of cancer in 1982, two years after Polygram had eased him out of his own company. It is one hell of a story, and if there is one man who can make sure that the whole messy saga gets told with every last excessive minute included, it's to be Simmons. We're waiting.
