Alex Winter is going to do a documentary about Napster

While I do love me some BILL & TED, there will always be a special place in my heart for Alex Winter in FREAKED. He quickly went from being in front of the camera to the guy behind the camera. Winter does television, commercials, and even a little writing here and there.

The projects Winter attaches himself to are usually of the smaller variety. This next one that he’s lining up is a bit bigger, plus it’s a genre he hasn’t ventured into– documentaries.

With the backing of VH1 and the same division that made ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL, Winter will do a documentary about the early days of Napster. Originally the project was over at MTV films but that fell through. That’s also when it was still a narrative.

Winter said this on his subject, “The rise and fall of Napster and the birth of peer-to-peer file-sharing technology created by Shawn Fanning when he was a college student, changed music to movies, and made possible everything from Julian Assange, WikiLeaks to the iPod and Facebook. t became an expression of youth revolt, and contributed to a complete shift in how information, media and governments work. And it is a fascinating human story, where this 18-year-old kid invents a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, and brings it to the world six months later.”

There are some who are still behind what Napster did and those who are still opposed to it. Winter states that the documentary will allow both sides to speak their peace on the issue. “Nobody wanted to deal with this college kid and the music industry took a hard stance and focused on shutting him down. It’s a gray area. I can understand Fanning’s side, but I can also empathize with the horror that Metallica’s Lars Ulrich felt when a single that wasn’t even finished ended up on the radio.” Napster’s Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker will both be participating and helping out with the doc. Winter is also gathering studio heads as well as artists to get in on the film.

Yes, the third BILL & TED film did get brought up. All Winter offered was this, “It’s early days on that project.”