The tumultuous life of the late music-industry mogul Neil Bogart, the man at least partly responsible for the disco explosion, could come to the big screen courtesy of a performer whose career he helped launch.

Kiss' Gene Simmons said he will produce a film version of Bogart's life story for Paramount Pictures. The serpentine-tongued bassist has been working on the film for 14 months, although a production date has yet to be determined.

When the film gets to the casting stage, Simmons said he'd like either Mike Myers or Kevin Spacey to play the over-the-top hitmaker.

"Like all great innovators, Neil Bogart completely ignored convention," Simmons said. "He was like no other man, a modern-day PT Barnum." Bogart personified music-industry decadence in his prime, and his excessive promotion tactics have become the stuff of legend. As general manger of Buddah Records, a 24-year-old Bogart discovered the Ohio Express in 1968 and released their bubblegum hits "Yummy Yummy Yummy" and "Chewy Chewy." After leaving Buddah in 1973, Bogart signed Kiss to his own Casablanca imprint. By pushing Donna Summer's 1975 song "Love to Love You Baby" to radio programmers relentlessly, the disco era got underway as the track became nearly ubiquitous on playlists.

Bogart's decline was as rapid as his ascent. Despite hits with Kiss and Summer, Casablanca suffered more than its share of misses, and the label couldn't stanch the financial hemorrhage caused by returns of overstocked albums in addition to Bogart's outlandish expenses.

Bogart sold Casablanca to Polygram at the end of the decade and founded Boardwalk Records, which released albums by Joan Jett. The mogul succumbed to cancer in 1982 at age 39.

The Bogart biopic isn't the only thing on Simmons' groaning board. He cites 18 projects on his to-do list, among them a VH1 series called "Hit Men," which he described as "the Sopranos meet the music industry," and the feature film "November Files," a conspiracy thriller about an accountant tangled up in a multinational money-laundering scheme.

Simmons' autobiography, "Kiss and Makeup," is slated to hit shelves in January. Ghostwritten by The New Yorker editor Ben Greenman, the tome is a "stranger in a strange land" story, beginning with Simmons' birth in Israel. Two MTV programs are also in the works: the original movie "Groupies," about a rock-star perquisite Simmons knows intimately, and "Gene Simmons' Chill-O-Rama," an anthology series in the vein of "The Twilight Zone." MTVi's parent company, Viacom, also owns Paramount Pictures, MTV and VH1.