The lumbering machine of film making never ceases to amaze me. I don’t mean the constant supply of films that clog multiplexes every year, but rather the startling rate by which creative ideas seem to be dwindling. Could it be that within the next decade or so there will be nothing left but remakes and the bile inducing films where a cultural (or pop cultural) touchstone is “celebrated” by a crappy movie made about it? I bring this notion because of one particularly hideous abortion of creativity that just finished shooting. The CBGB movie.
I will repeat that.
The CBGB movie.
Even though there are enough people breathing from the glory days of the iconic New York rock club to orchestrate a compelling documentary, the powers that be decided the CBGB story would be best served via scripted cinema. Sure the filmmakers will base their vehicle on hours of research and interviews with staff, friends, regulars and so on, but all of that will be filtered through the eye of the writer and director, who happen to be one in the same. Randall Miller penned the script with his wife Jody Savin and chose to direct the film himself. No matter how hard they insist otherwise, the film will be his vision of CBGB.
This is the problem with the CBGB movie and most films based on pop culture moments or figures. Try as they might, those who were not there and had no real inside connection to CBGB will see the rock club through rose colored icon glasses. The cast will portray their parts the easiest way possible. You really think Taylor Hawkins, the drummer for Foo Fighters, is going to dig deep into the psyche of Iggy Pop for his portrayal? Nope, he’s going to take the simplest stereotypes of the famed singer and blow them up. Shirtless, wiggling, a dazed look of drug-induced psychosis – that’s how Iggy Pop will be portrayed. Hawkins won’t be able to help it. Iggy is too great a legend, too great a character of not to be portrayed as as a caricature, especially by a guy who isn’t even an actor.
Joel David Moore, who plays Joey Ramone, will do the same thing, as will Malin Akerman as Blondie. Then we have one of the most ridiculous casting choices ever, Alan Rickman as CBGB owner Hilly Kristal. The bad guy from Die Hard as Hilly? You can almost see the filmmakers high-fiving at what an “off beat and edgy” casting choice they made. The rest of us will just see Hans Gruber in a bad wig. Rupert Grint, the redhead from Harry Potter, is going to portray Cheetah Chrome from Dead Boys. Wow, how right on the cutting edge can you get? One actor, now part of two massive slices of pop culture? Break out the wool ski hats and PBR, that’s hipster yahtzee right there.
Outside of getting actors (or non actors) to play iconic people, there’s the whole “why do we need this” aspect. Hasn’t enough been done to CBGB? Can’t we just leave it the fuck alone? That club has been fucked so much it might want to call a rape crisis center. Imagine being one of the central reasons the rich and entitled flocked down to the lower east side and then be run out of business because of taxes and the whole push to clean up the downtown area by those who moved down town to slum with the CBGB creative types in the first place. These days CBGB has been gutted and transformed into a “rocker” store, a place where Slash or Brett Michaels would go to get a rocker suit for some rocker night out doing rocker things. To make matters worse, certain sections of old CBGB are encased in glass as spectacle for the rocker shopper looking to buy a leather suit.
Perhaps the saddest part is that folks like Richard Hell, David Byrne and Tom Verlaine (of Television) are said to have bit parts in the movie. While Hell surprises me, Byrne is perhaps the worst hypocrite of all. His constant dismissal of doing a Talking Heads reunion because he doesn’t want to revisit the past seems odd when he’s going to be an extra in a “rock n roll comedy” about the club. Think I’m wrong on the comedy idea? Take a good look at the poster and tell I’m off base. The filmmakers were probably having 24 Hour Party People visions in their heads. Yeah, I doubt that.
Finally we have to look at the fact that the CBGB movie will add to the mound of dirt currently burying the seventies era of the club. We get it, Blondie and the Ramones started there, so did Talking Heads, congrats to Television. I love all these bands but seriously, CBGB had a whole other era nobody will touch. I was a child of New York Hardcore, a scene that erupted through CBGBs in the early eighties and through out the decade. Sunday matinees are just as culturally significant as the seventies era, and touched upon far less. Where is the movie on that CBGB era?
Seriously. Where is the scripted film about Agnostic Front, Murphy’s Law, Sick Of It All, Cro-Mags, and all the other NYHC bands that had a massive impact and a cultural shift of music? Why not have Ryan Gosling play Pete from Sick Of It All or Joseph Gordon Levitt as Lou. Tom Hardy as John Joseph of the Cro-Mags? I’d pay good money to see anybody even attempt playing Jimmy Gestapo from Murphy’s Law. Instead we’ll get a group of people filming another group of people and all of them lionizing and deifying a simple rock club an era that has been documented to the Nth degree.
This is not just my outcry of foul. Having been around CBGB for several years, I know a lot of people who worked there. They’ve all got gripes about this film and how it came about. Some even say certain factions within the CBGB circle are pushing this joke of a movie simply for a cash shill. Most of these voices won’t be heard because they don’t jibe with the wacky comedy rock n roll cool project that this film is destined to be. For me personally, where the fuck where all these people with hard-ons for CBs when the place was closing? This is another example of vultures picking apart the bones of something once the dust has cleared.
Think I’m wrong about all this? In a Rolling Stone article on the film, director/writer Randall Miller referred to CBGB as “a salon on the Bowery”. If that bit of pretentious bullshit doesn’t clue you in on how bad the CBGB movie will be. Nothing will.
