Some 25 years after they started out, they're gearing up for a new album and another massive tour in 1998, but they'd like to take an A-list filmmaker along for the ride.

They hatched a project about their formative years with "Rocky" producer Gene Kirkwood and manager Doc McGhee.

Hearing the story of their early years reminds one of "The Commitments," if that Irish soul band employed kabuki makeup and spiked heels.

Picture the fire-breathing, blood-dripping demonic and growly voice bass player Simmons at the age of 12, when he was a Hasidic Orthodox Jew from Israel who found a new faith one fateful day while exiting the yeshiva.

"I remember walking out onto the street, seeing this Spanish girl jumping rope across the street, and staring at her long black hair slapping against this great butt," he recalled. "It occurred to me this was better than religion. How could I get near that?"

Stanley, the lead singer with the jet-engine vocals, wasn't always sex symbol material.

"I was deaf in one ear, and had a slight deformity that made me look different," Stanley said. "I was this short fat kid, and music became my salvation, a place to hide and dream. And when I played music, there were always girls around."

Though their musical motives matched, Simmons and Stanley didn't when they met.

"Gene felt he, Lennon and McCartney were the only ones who wrote music," Stanley said. "I played him a song that ended up on our first album, and he played three for me, one about soup."

They scratched the soup anthem, but formed Kiss with guitarist Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss.

Combining Simmons' passion for comics with the '70s Gotham glitter rock craze, they hit the makeup mirror with a specific goal: Become the Beatles on steroids.

"All the glitter-rock bands had wrists as thin as their girlfriends did, and here we looked like linebackers who had raided their girlfriends' closets," Stanley said.

At an early downtown date, they heard snickers from their glam counterparts "until we plugged in and played, and then everyone's mouths hung open," Simmons said.

Despite huge success, the band's trademark power chords were overshadowed by internal discord that led to the exits of Criss and Frehley.

Simmons and Stanley kept going, but shed the makeup until last year. They've had past meetings with filmmaking fans like David Fincher and Cameron Crowe, but resisted biopic overtures.

"Until the rebirth, there was no ending," Simmons said. "Now, if we get the right filmmaker, we'll follow his vision."

"The big benefit," said Kirkwood, "is you can get a Johnny Depp or Keanu Reeves to play the guys offstage, then you cut to the real Kiss members onstage in their makeup, with that great music."