Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMKjx8ilLCY&ab_channel=EntertainmentFilms

 

I also recently watched Pistol, Danny Boyle’s miniseries about Steve Jones and the very brief life of the Sex Pistols, based on Jones autobiography, Lonely Boy. Having grown up through the Punk era, a lot of it didn’t ring true so I bought a copy of Lonely Boy along with Chrissie Hynde’s autobiography and also re-read both of John Lydon’s books and sure enough, inaccuracies abound in the miniseries. Now, given the nature of the four surviving members of the band and over four-decades of selective memories, I doubt they would agree on the way everything went down anyway but simple things like Chrissie asking Lydon to marry her, not Jones, which all three agree on, is pointless. That’s not poetic license, it’s re-writing history.

 

It’s an impossible task to recreate someone who is so highly regarded by so many people, albeit friends, family or fans and to condense their lives into two hours or even a six-hour miniseries. It can be done well and has been on many occasions but generally speaking, there seems to be in the movie industry a general lack of fact-checking so that whenever a biopic is made of a rock star, there are ridiculous inaccuracies. When I watched Take Me Home: The John Denver Story (2000) I was astonished to see the character perform This Old Guitar in the mid-1960’s when he didn’t write it until 1974. The film also states that he wrote Flying For Me for his father who was a pilot and died in 1982 when in actual fact, he wrote it after watching the Challenger disaster in 1986. Now to the average TV watcher, maybe even you, this may not seem important as the average viewer doesn’t really care but the problem is, these things have a habit of becoming fact because they are put down on film. Another film I recently re-watched was Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) and the sequence where Jim is being photographed for what would become the iconic Young Lion image has a glaring error. In fact, the photo was taken by the great Joel Brodsky but in the film, the photographer is a woman. That not only is inaccurate, it’s an insult to Brodsky.

 

I have to say that in pretty much every biopic I’ve seen and generally speaking, the actors and actresses do an excellent job of portraying the subject. I enjoy biopics even if they do have factual errors in them but it does bother me when the simplest of facts are changed for no reason at all. In the wonderful film Sid & Nancy (1986), Nancy is seen putting the famous padlock around Sid’s neck when in fact it was given to him by Chrissie Hynde, later of The Pretenders – at least they got that right in Pistol. The Runaways (2010) has so many errors that it would be impossible to list them all here but the outstanding one is when the band manager, Kim Fowley, brings in local kids to throw dog poop at them during rehearsals; that just never happened so why is it in there? In a scene from the film Ray (2004), a recording studio has florescent lighting and to my knowledge, there is no recording studio in the world that would use fluorescent lighting because it causes the equipment to hum. Also in the same film, Ray is banned from Georgia in 1962 after refusing to play a segregated concert but again, this never happened. Yes, he did refuse to play a segregated concert but he was never banned nor apologized to as the end credits state. The Johnny Cash bio-pic Walk The Line has a scene where he smashes the footlights in a theatre in Las Vegas when in actual fact, he famously smashed them at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.

Sid And Nancy trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TubehkbjOuI&ab_channel=StudiocanalUK

 

La Bamba (1987) is a terrific film to watch with great music and superb portrayal of Ritchie Valens by Lou Diamond Phillips but it is ruined by one point and that is when Buddy Holly performs Crying, Waiting, Hoping. Buddy never played that song live as it was only ever recorded as a demo at his home in December 1958 with just himself and a guitar. The song wasn’t finished or released until after his death in February 1959 when the demo along with five others were given to producer Jack Hansen to add other musicians and singers; it was eventually released as the B-Side to Peggy Sue Got Married in July 1959. The set list for that tour has never been fully documented (and now probably won’t be) but according to guitarist Tommy Allsup:

 

"The set list started every night with Gotta Travel On. It Doesn't Matter Anymore had just been released, and we did it on the tour also. We also always did Peggy Sue, That'll Be The Day, It's So Easy, Everyday, Oh Boy, Early In The Morning, Rave On and every once in a while we would do some Little Richard songs."

 

So seems odd that of all the Buddy Holly songs they could have picked for the film, they use one that he didn’t play and whilst we’re on the subject of Buddy Holly, The Buddy Holly Story (1978) as entertaining a film is it is, is probably the most factually incorrect biopic of a rock star ever made. Gary Busey’s uncanny portrayal of Buddy is brilliant so why on earth in one scene is he depicted playing a white Fender Telecaster when everyone knows he played a sunburst Stratocaster? Why in that final concert sequence is he backed by a full orchestra when the reality was just a three-piece backing band? Also, with reference to that final concert, the billboard says Feb 3rd when of course it should be Feb 2nd and even the venue is wrong: the last show was at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, not the Clear Lake Auditorium. The names of The Crickets were changed from Jerry Allison and Joe B. Mauldin to Jesse and Ray Bob; Maybe Baby was not performed on the Ed Sullivan Show (That’ll Be The Day and Peggy Sue were) and the caps on Buddy’s front teeth were knocked out before the second show at the Hammersmith Odeon, London in March 1958, not in the USA and not before a TV broadcast as depicted in the film. All these things were known at the time of filming. All that said, this is still one of my favourite biopics - love it.