Ladies and Gentlemen, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains", Rediscovered Again

Phil Nugent — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Aaron Hillis in Spin documents the story behind Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, the '80s cult item that he terms, with some justice, "the missing link between punk and riot grrl." Stains was the brainchild of Nancy Dowd, who made her bones as a screenwriter in the late 1970s with Slap Shot and Coming Home. Punk was still a going concern when Dowd completed her script (originally called "All Washed Up") about some rebellious teenage girls whose bad attitudes and worse music briefly turn them into stars and role models for disaffected youth. The script fell into the hands of director Lou Adler, who had helped produce the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, brought The Rocky Horror Show to America, and then turned filmmaker with the first Cheech and Chong picture, Up in Smoke. Adler may have been looking for a new subculture to milk, but Dowd managed to bring in music journalist Caroline Coon to serve as the film's technical adviser, and the on-screen cast didn't lack for authenticity: Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols and Paul Simonon of the Clash were brought in to make a raucous noise behind an aspiring punk vocalist played by an unrecognizable, skinny young Ray Winstone, and Fee Waybill of the Tubes contributed a surprisingly moving performance as a has-been metal singer, whose features hang down as if to protest all the make-up he's slathered on them over the years. (According to Waybill, authenticity in many forms kept breaking out all over on the set, and he was usually on the wrong side of it. At one point the rough young Winstone, who was supposed to hit Waybill in a scene, failed to pull his punches and gave his co-star a black eye. On another occasion, an overly helpful prop man substituted the pretend cocaine that the characters were supposed to be snorting with the real thing--"And I hated coke. They cut, and Lou goes, 'Man, that looked so real!' Then we do the same thing from five or six different camera angles. The one and only time I ever snorted coke is on film, and I'm just whacked.") At the center of the movie, though, are Diane Lane, as the leader of the Stains, and Diane Ladd, as one of her bandmates. They were both barely in their mid-teens at the time. (The third Stain, Marin Kanter, disappeared from the movies after appearances in such out-of-the-way pictures as Alan Rudolph's Endangered Species and The Loveless, a fetishistic biker film co-directed by Kathryn Bigelow.)

The movie wrapped shooting in 1980, but a couple of years slipped by while Adler tinkered with it in the editing room. By that time, Dowd had decided to remove her name from the project, in part out of pique over sexist behavior on the set, and the movie's topical moment passed. By the time it started getting previewed in 1982, it looked, as Steve Jones put it, "corny." Without ever getting a proper theatrical release or being released to home video, it spent another three years slipping in and out of a few art theaters, but it really built up its cult reputation through appearances on late night cable TV. By the early 1990s, Courtney Love and such bands as Bikini Kill had taken it to their heart and proclaimed it a valuable training film for women who wanted to know what they could expect to deal with in the music business. Now that music clearances have been worked out, Stains fans have an imminent DVD release to look forward to, and Diane Lane, whose Oscar-nominated performance in 2002's Unfaithful helped cement her current role as a leading thinking person's sex symbol among respected American actresses shading forty, has a lost trinket from her raging youth to use to confuse her kids. "I was freaking out!" she recalls now. "The most poignant irony is that my daughter is going to be exactly the age I was when the DVD comes out. It's not shocking, just a little bit embarrassing that it happens to be your mom." The Spin article is worth checking out, not least because it includes another lost trinket, a "mini-documentary" about the movie that, unless my bleary eyes and bloodshot memory deceive me, is actually a 1999 segment from Split Screen, John Pierson's classic and much-missed indie-film-scene TV newsmagazine show for the IFC Channel. So when's that coming to DVD?

Take Five: Weed

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT

We were going to call this Take Five "Buddha", and then, like, totally blow your mind by not including Kundun, but frankly, we're just too, you know, we're too, uh...what were we talking about? Oh, right! That weed! The chronic! Sweet Mary Jane! A favorite in Hollywood for so many years that it doesn't even seem like a vice to some people (remember Tom Hagen warning the movie producer in The Godfather that one of his stars was about to 'graduate' from marijuana to cocaine), it was a while before social pressures eased up enough to portray herb in anything but the most hysterical terms. How far we've come, bros! Today, only a few scant days after 4/20 (the national stoner's holiday), we can each of us get nicely toasted and ditch work early for a matinee of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which posits that even our Commander-in-Chief enjoys a good bong hit now and again. The noir classic The Sweet Smell of Success contained a plot point that expected us to believe that a jazz musician -- and a white one, at that! -- might see his career ruined by the mere possession of the devil weed, while the new Kal Penn/John Cho vehicle implies that toking up on a regular basis is the best career move you can make. Here's five more films that deal with the sweet leaf in all its hazy glory.

REEFER MADNESS (1936)

This absurd scare-flick is typical of the anti-drug hysteria of the 1920s and 1930s; it's only exceptional in that it's exceptionally over-the-top in its woozy narrative, lurid dialogue, and bizarrely sensationalistic vision of what marijuana will do to you. (Apparently, it turns you into a murderer or a sex fiend instead of a lazy Xbox-addicted dolt.) Directed by French-born Louis Gasnier (whose other major claim to fame was the Perils of Pauline serial), it's unintentionally hilarious to the degree that it's been reissued endlessly in every format imaginable for new generations of potheads to giggle at. In fact, for a film that did poor business, featured no stars, and is incompetently made at every level, it very well may be that Reefer Madness is the most-watched film of the 1930s. Ah, irony.

CHEECH & CHONG'S UP IN SMOKE (1978)

You simply can't talk about dope movies without mentioning Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, the guys who turned them from a taboo into a franchise. Although it's easy to condemn the boys for how quickly their on-screen efforts turned into dogshit (I'm still reeling from The Corsican Brothers), those only familiar with how bad things eventually got might want to go back and give their motion picture debut another look. It's not great art or anything, and Lou Adler's direction is strictly syndicated sitcom level, but it's got a number of genuinely funny moments, some hilarious dialogue, some swell celebrity cameos from Tom Skerritt and Stacy Keach, and all in all, it's exactly what a stoner comedy shoud be: a good-natured, consequence-free thumb in the nose to petty authority. Good afternoon viewing for a baked summer day.

THE BIG LEBOWKSI (1998)

It's downright shocking that such a successful dopehead comedy was made by the Coen Brothers. While I certainly can't speak to their own habits of indulgence or not, their filmmaking is incredibly tight and unbelievably disciplined, exactly the opposite of most art created by the Cheeba-American community. And yet along comes The Big Lebowski: a movie that, aside from being an unbelievably funny comedy and an eerily precise if cleverly disguised Raymond Chandler detective story, is probably the most perfect stoner flick ever made. The Dude is the ultimate slacker hero, lighting a J when he gets bored listening to the title character rattle on about hard work and responsibility, as well as the roach-butt of many a joke, as he smashes up his much-abused car after dropping a maggot on his pants while driving.

HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE (2004)

Of course, we can't praise the sometimes subtle, sometimes anvil-heavy stoner comedy of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay without mentioning its predecessor, a hugely successful cult flick that came out of nowhere and captured the public imagination in just the right way with its combination of gregarious dope jokes and over-the-top grossout comedy. It launched the careers of appealing leads Kal Penn and John Cho; it proved that you can make a successful buddy picture without a white guy; and best of all, it was funny as hell and forced beloved/reviled mini-hamburger chain White Castle to acknowledge its existence with an extreme line-toeing ad campaign that tried to capitalize on the movie's success without explicitly avowing the truth: that White Castle is the preferred 3AM nosh joint for the seriously blunted.

SUPER HIGH ME (2007)

Explicitly lifted from Morgan Spurlock's anti-McDonald's stunt documentary Super Size Me, and based on little more than a two-minute comedy routine by star Doug Benson, Super High Me -- which combines a fairly legitimate section on drug law reform, straight-up concert footage of Benson's act, and extended segments of his attempt to get high every day for a month -- isn't the most coherent or well-presented film you'll ever see. Which, given the topic, is pretty understandable. But it's got its funny moments, and if nothing else, it allows you to see that Benson is none the worse for wear after his 'experiment' (which, let's be honest, would represent cutting back for a lot of people), and the movie is stocked with successful actors and comedians who are successful and yet get stoned quite regularly. It's a good thing Benson's not black, though, or this movie would probably be used as evidence at his trial.

The Screengrab : lou adler

Ladies and Gentlemen, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains", Rediscovered Again

Take Five: Weed