Inside Move: Tracing his teeny-bopper roots

Wahlberg to mine pop-star past for TV

By MICHAEL SCHNEIDER

Donnie Wahlberg is developing a TV project that explores how he went from the streets of Boston to pop idoldom with late-'80s boy band New Kids On The Block.

Warner Bros. TV and Relevant Entertainment are on board to produce the project, which will focus on how the tumultuous world of desegregation in 1970s Boston eventually led Wahlberg to his music career.

"My roots were the buses in Boston," Wahlberg said. "White kids were being bused to black schools in Boston, and black kids were being sent to white schools. Here I am, sitting on the bus, making friends and being exposed to people and cultures that I may have never been exposed to. It allowed me to dream a little bit more."

Wahlberg, star of "Saw II" and TV skein "Boomtown," would exec produce but wouldn't star, and he is currently scouting for a writer to head up the show. Relevant's Jonathan Baruch and Michael Prevett are also aboard as producers.

Wahlberg said he initially scoffed when Baruch and Prevett suggested he revisit his first taste of fame.

"I didn't give enough credit to my experience until I tracked it," he said. "I realized, wait a minute, there's some good stuff here. The initial idea was about my music career. But I realized that I couldn't tell the story without painting the picture of how I wound up there in the first place."

Hence the broader story of how Boston was turned upside down by busing -- and how Wahlberg wound up embracing urban culture.

"It will follow a street kid in one of the most racially hostile periods in the history of America," Wahlberg said. "And how he came through it."

Wahlberg said he also decided to come up with a project on his own after the heartbreak of seeing shows like "Boomtown" and last season's period actioner "NY-70," in which he starred with Bobby Cannavale, disappear.

"I'm motivated now to create my own stuff instead of being an employee," he said. "As an actor you don't have enough say-so. I want more input, more control. If the network then screws it up, so be it."