Adam Shankman

The young Mozart is coming to television via Adam Shankman’s Offspring Entertainment and IM Global TV, which is at MIPCOM this week trying to find a production partner to help fund the period drama, which will depict the musical prodigy as “a as genius and celebrity of his time, and will also depict the court of Marie Antoinette,” according to Variety.

The show, which is being shopped around Cannes under the name Coda, will be written by David Israel and directed by Shankman, who although best-know as a producer of films and TV shows including Glee is also a choreographer, and has also directed nearly 30 projects. Among his directorial efforts are: 2012’s Rock of Ages, the 2007 remake of Hairspray, A Walk to Remember (2002) and Bringing Down the House (2003). 

“It really captures a man who was a true genius, but through a lens we haven’t necessarily seen before,” IM president of scripted television Mark Stern told Variety. “It feels like a potent idea, and one that could travel really well. It is a mix of behind the scenes of the crown, and looking at Mozart as a temperamental artist who had his own following, and how he traveled through these worlds.”

Mozart was a prodigy on violin and keyboard who played before royalty at age of five. By 17 he was engaged as a court musician in his hometown of Salzburg, Austria. He died at the age of 34, a meteoric rise and fall memorably captured in the film Amadeus, which won eight Academy Awards. While it has nothing to do with the actual Mozart, the popular Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle about the exploits of a contemporary orchestra (dubbed sex, drugs and classical music) is no doubt burnishing the 18th century Viennese wild-child’s television brand.

IM Global Television develops, funds, produces and distributes programming for the domestic and international marketplace. Among the networks with which the company has recently placed product are FX, Amazon, Netflix, and Lifetime. In 2016 IMG was acquired by Tang Media Partners, a self-described “Chinese and U.S. content ecosystem.”

No word yet on when or where Coda will air.

Created by sculptor Philip Jackson, this bronze of the young Mozart sits at Orange Square, the London neighborhood where Mozart lived for many years and wrote his first two symphonies at age 8. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)