AUGUST 13, 1999 – The KISS-produced movie “Detroit Rock City” premiered in US theaters. Directed by Adam Rifkin and written by Carl V. Dupré, it is a story of four teenage boys in a KISS cover band who travel to see their idols perform a concert in Detroit in 1978. Comparable to “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,” “Dazed and Confused,” “The Stöned Age,” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” at its core it is a coming-of-age story related through a filter of 1970s music and US culture, which took its title from the KISS song of the same name.
The film was shot at Cedarbrae Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, Toronto and other Ontario locations including Copps Coliseum in Hamilton. According to drummer Peter Criss, the movie started as a passion project for associate producer Tim Sullivan, who’d befriended singer/bassist Gene Simmons after interviewing him for Fangoria magazine in 1983. Given the embarrassment the band had suffered with the infamous “KISS Meets The Phantom of the Park” TV-movie project in 1978, Simmons knew the script for any KISS film needed to be just right, and they found it in a screenplay from writer Carl V. Dupre, whose previous credits included eight episodes of the TV series “Bone Chillers.” Sullivan remembered the film “was literally one of the most effortless projects. Gene Simmons gave me the script in July, I brought it into New Line and told them it was one of the best scripts I’d ever read regardless of whether you liked KISS or not and they bought it. Six weeks later we were in Toronto in pre-production.”
Although “Detroit Rock City” pulled in less than $5 million during its theatrical run, a disastrous showing for a movie with a reported $34 million budget, like their 1978 TV movie, it eventually acquired something of a cult status on the home-video market.