Footage of a screentest Kiss frontman Paul Stanley filmed in the 1980s has surfaced online, and it’s really quite something.
In the clip, a makeup-free Stanley delivers a wild-eyed, overtly dramatic performance alongside an unseen reading partner.
“You need money, you come to me,” menaces Stanley. “Who the fuck do you think you are, raising cash without coming to me?”
“Your ex-partner,” Stanley’s reading partner explains. “I’m buying you out, Joe. Read the contract.”
“Fuck the contract, you son of a bitch!” Stanley continues, with the wild intensity of a pressure cooker about to blow. “Two years ago, no one would touch you. You were begging me for money!”
“But you’re making an eighty per cent return, which is what you wanted,” responds the off-camera voice.
“Don’t turn around when I’m talkin’ to you!” Stanley threatens, gesturing towards the camera.
While the video’s uploader is unable to identify the source of the footage, the dialogue suggests that Stanley was reading lines from Someone To Watch Over Me, a neo-noir romantic thriller starring Tom Beringer and Mini Rodgers. Directed by Ridley Scott, the film was released in 1987.
Both Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons briefly pursued Hollywood roles in the early 1980s, with Stanley filming a cameo for the 1982 comedy Young Doctors in Love. Tragically, his scenes were ultimately left on the cutting room floor.
More happily, Stanley’s dramatic yearnings were satisfied when he played the lead role in a production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera staged at the Pantages Theatre in Toronto, Canada, in 1999.
(LouderSound)
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