Speaking with Ultimate Classic Rock, KISS frontman Paul Stanley discussed the band's End Of The Road tour and the forthcoming Netflix biopic, Shout It Out Loud, which will focus just on the band's first four years, through their breakthrough of the Alive! album.

Stanley "We weren't looking to document the band's history. I think it's too big a story to try to chronicle all of it. I think the dynamics of how it started and how it reached the boiling point and got that initial success are really engaging. There's loads of great stories afterwards, but that's the foundation that we built on. That's what made everything else possible, so that's the story to tell."

Stanley calls the film "a work in progress," with casting and other announcements expected before year's end.

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According to sources speaking with the press back in April, Netflix tied up a deal after a bidding battle for a film that will be directed by Joachim Rønning, the Norwegian filmmaker whose credits include Kon-Tiki, Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil and Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. The script is written by Ole Sanders. Pic will be a co-production of Mark Canton’s Atmosphere Entertainment and Universal Music Group.

Shout It Out Loud will have close cooperation from bandleaders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. The band’s concert arena anthems will be a big part of this, but the film will focus on that duo going back to when they were two misfit kids from Queens who formed an unlikely friendship, starting KISS after enlisting guitarist Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss. Trying to set themselves apart from the ‘hair’ bands of the day, they accented their power chords and pyrotechnics with makeup. At heart, their formative story is in the vein of The Commitments, if that Irish soul band employed makeup and spiked heels.

Picture the fire-breathing, blood-dripping demonic and growly voiced bass player Simmons at the age of 12, when he was a Hasidic Orthodox Jew from Israel who found a new faith one fateful day while exiting the yeshiva. “I remember walking out onto the street, seeing this Spanish girl jumping rope across the street, and staring at her long black hair slapping against this great butt,” he once said. “It occurred to me this was better than religion. How could I get near that?”

Stanley, the lead singer with the jet-engine vocals, wasn’t always sex symbol material. “I was deaf in one ear, and had a slight deformity that made me look different,” Stanley said. “I was this short fat kid, and music became my salvation, a place to hide and dream. And when I played music, there were always girls around.”

Read more at Deadline.com.