Jagger, DiCaprio, to produce music biopic

Mick Jagger and Leonardo DiCaprio are two A-list names behind a new movie about one of rock’s first behind-the-scenes legends Sam Phillips.

A record producer and disc jockey, Phillips founded Sun Studios and Sun Records in Memphis in 1952, and launched the careers of ‘50s rockers including Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ike Turner, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins.

Jagger will produce the still untitled movie. DiCaprio will co-produce and also play Phillips. It will be made for Paramount Pictures and based on music journalist Peter Guralnick’s book Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’N’ Roll.

The Rolling Stones singer’s past production credits included the TV series Vinyl on the New York music industry in the 1970s (and which was cancelled after one season), and Enigma about code breaking during World War II.

Leonardo Di Caprio who won the Best Actor Oscar for The Revenant, is producing two documentaries while looking for his next acting project.

The first, Before the Flood, is a climate change film with a soundtrack by Trent Reznor. The Ivory Race is Netflix’s look at the illegal ivory trade. The actor is also behind the big screen reboot of the 1990s environmental cartoon Captain Planet, the superhero who fights environmental baddies.

Sam Phillips was instrumental in making rock and roll and rockabilly major mainstream music forms. He challenged his stars by offering a free Cadillac to the first on his label to sell a million records (won by Perkins).

Elvis Presley, the first “king of rock and roll” came to his attention after the 18-year-old cut a birthday present demo at Sun Studios for his mother. Phillips was tipped off by his engineer as to the quality of the teenage truck driver voice.

Presley wanted to release a ballad as his first record. But Phillips insisted on a version of the R&B hit That’s Alright (he produced the session), and a multi-billion dollar industry was born.

He also oversaw the legendary Million Dollar Quartet session in December 1956, when Presley, Cash, Perkins and Lewis found themselves in the studio coincidentally at the same time, and a jam session was quickly recorded.

The son of a farmer, Phillips worked in the cotton fields as a child, and first heard blues songs sung by African-American workers.

He had planned to become a lawyer. But after his father went bankrupt, the son had to drop out of school to work in a funeral parlour to maintain the family.

Phillips championed social justice and racial equality in the 1950s, and used his power for better deals by the music industry as a whole for black musicians. In the mid-50s, he also set up the first all-girl radio station WHER where all the on-air and off-air employees were females.

After selling off his rights to Elvis Presley to RCA Records for $35,000, Phillips also sold the Sun label and studio in 1969 and became one of the first investors of the Holiday Inn chain, a new concept at the time.

He died on July 30, 2003, of respiratory failure in a Memphis hospital, just weeks before the passing of Johnny Cash.