It’ll surprise many to hear that the world-famous male striptease outfit, the Chippendales have been around since 1979. While they now known for being at the more reputable end of sexy entertainment, it hasn’t always been that way.
Deadline reports that Dev Patel and Ben Stiller are set to star in a movie about the early days of the outfit, when things got very dangerous and murky. In the movie, Patel will play Bombay-born immigrant Steve Banerjee, who turned an LA dive bar into Chippendales, which very quickly gained a huge following and legions of fan. Ben Stiller will be children’s show producer Nick DeNoia, who ‘recruited the musclebound G-string clad dancers, choreographed their routines and ran a touring company of strippers.’
However, the American dream soon turned soured, as ‘Besides DeNoia, early co-creators included Paul Snider, whose Playboy bunny girlfriend Dorothy Stratten helped come up with the signature cuffs and collars uniforms (before everything but the G-string came off). Snider would later murder Stratten and kill himself (a sordid tragedy chronicled in the Bob Fosse-directed Star 80). Lawsuits and disputes between Banerjee followed, leading to a violence-filled descent. DeNoia was murdered, shot in the face in his New York office. Banerjee would plead guilty of orchestrating that murder, and for an attempt to burn down rival clubs, and for hiring a hit man for other murders including another former Chippendales choreographer. Hours before he was to be sentenced to a long prison sentence for murder, arson and racketeering in 1994, Banerjee was found hanged in his jail cell, his death ruled a suicide.’
It’s quite a story, and could make one hell of a movie.
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