Filmmakers Don Argott and Demian Fenton spent years with Pentagram frontman Bobby Liebling, documenting the profligate rock god as he shot up, smoked rock, ran his mouth, shared his record stash, and struggled to escape a decades-long addiction that left him nearing early death in the “sub-basement” of his parents’ home. Alternately big-hearted and beastly, Liebling tells the Philly-based filmmakers that “I ain’t done no record, in my opinion, that hasn’t kicked ass.” There’s not a single person in their new film, Last Days Here, who would disagree. Argott and Fenton are themselves metal fans—their band, Serpent Throne, has a stellar set of Satan-themed songs. Here, they talk about Liebling, his parents, his bandmates’ refusal to skip their janitorial job the day they played for Kiss, and his one-man savior, Sean “Pellet” Pelletier, who resolves to haul Bobby out of the sub-basement and introduce his music to the world. Bobby will appear in person with the filmmakers at Cinefamily tonight. This interview by Rin Kelly.

You spent a lot of time in the sub-basement while working on this project. I’m wondering how the sub-basement changes a man.
Don Argott: I’d never smelled crack smoke before. That was cool. No, you know, I think that it was a world which you know, say, listening to heavy metal as long as I had—and I think Demian and I had similar experiences growing up—I’d certainly hung out in the woods with kids drinkin’ and smokin’ pot, but I’d really never been around anyone doing really hard heavy drugs. So it was definitely an eye-opening experience. But as filmmakers it’s our job to not be judgmental and not pass judgment on the situation, how we feel about it. It’s more trying to be honest about where we are and respectful to whose world we’re in. It’s certainly not our world.
Demian Fenton: That being said, I’m someone, I can sleep wherever, end up wherever, do whatever, but man, there were moments where we were locked down there for a while, with crack smoke billowing and music blarin’ and the door locked—it was tough to sustain sometimes. It was tough to stay.
You were down there five or six hours the first time. Did you leave thinking this was going to end up being a feature documentary or did you think it would just be a sad documentation of someone’s literal last days, his last year?
DA: The first day that we were there is the first scene in the film where Bobby’s showing us his clothes. A lot of the early interviews were from that first day. I think we had a long ride home and talked about the first day that we went down there. ‘We can’t make a film about a guy dying in a basement. I don’t want to see that. And I don’t know anybody who’s going to want to see it.’
DF: ‘And I don’t want to make it.’
DA: And we don’t want to make it. But there was something—we all collectively felt that there was something there in this guy. He had a little bit of a glimmer in his eye, especially when he couldn’t wait to play us music, even stuff that he’d recorded in the basement with a couple guys. He was still kind of making music. That was the one thing that he was just—no matter what we talked about it always kind of ended back talking about music. He always got excited about that so we really felt that there was something there and it was really at that moment when we felt— we stuck with it a couple of times just to see where things went. It wasn’t until we realized Pellet’s involvement in the piece—that he was going to be a character in the piece—we really never envisioned him to be that. It wasn’t until that moment that we really saw the film open up. I think at that point forward it took on a life of its own.
DF: There are kind of two journeys in the film. There’s Pellet’s journey, which is kind of this goal to pull Bobby out of the basement with these kinds of grand musical goals, the big show. What I like about this film, it kind of transcends the whole rock-doc thing. It’s this guy in the basement who could care less. It’s not really that he doesn’t want to play music but rather than looking at this grand show and this huge finale, he’s looking to start a life. Pellet was kind of looking to button something up for this guy. That’s what I really love about the film are these kind of journeys happening together. And it took us a little while to figure out that that’s what was going on.
Pellet seems like an absolute hero of a guy. How did you find him, and how far into his time as Bobby wrangler did you spot the gray starting to come out in his beard?
DF: It’s funny, man. I had always heard about Pellet just cuz we had mutual friends. He’s so sincere about music and he’s always had two feet in the metal world. I’d always heard of him but had never met him. I was at a show—a poorly attended metal show outside of Philly where there were probably fourteen people there—and I think the three drunkest dudes were my friend, me and Pellet. I approached him and began chatting with him. I had heard that he was kind of working on a book and he was mainly helping Bobby get Pentagram’s music out there. I approached him and said, ‘We make movies and blah blah blah,’ and I’m sure when you hear some drunk guy say, ‘Yeah, we make movies and blaaaah,’ he’s like, ‘Alright …’ But we kind of built his trust as well by proving that we were legit and that we meant business. So that’s how that happened. The gray hair really started forming, I would say … I’ve always had gray hair. Pellet’s beard! It was such a journey and Pellet was always really—he got beat up a lot on this journey. He’s so passionate about music. He needed all that passion. He needed that much gas in the tank to get through this. Anyone else, myself included, would have been gone way earlier.
DA: Way early.
How did you first learn about Pentagram?
DA: I didn’t know a lot about them. It’s one of those things where, you know, there’s very few undiscovered bands or undiscovered music where you feel like there’s a reason why it’s not discovered. There are certain obscure 70s rock bands that have one or two good songs, but you can understand why they never made it big. And it was really, for me, listening to that compilation that Pellet was instrumental in getting released, First Daze Here I and II—those songs are fuckin amazing. It’s kind of unbelievable that they never made it big. I’m not saying that because I like obscure music or whatever. I don’t think that their music is obscure at all. I think it’s very accessible. I think it’s really good. And it is surprising that they hadn’t gotten bigger than they did. But I think that was another really cool thing about it. There’s a lot of films like The Devil and Daniel Johnston, films where it’s a really good film and you have a lot of people in the film telling you how much of a genius Daniel Johnston is. Some people might be able to hear it and other people might not be able to hear it. I probably fall in that latter camp a little bit. But this music to me, it’s just really good, pure hard rock, really melodic, great songwriting, great guitar tones.
DF: You could totally hear it on a classic rock station. Right in between Aerosmith and, I don’t know, Mountain.
DA: Seriously. That was really cool. I think that’s an ancillary benefit to this film getting out there, exposing more people to this music. But that certainly was never the goal. The goal was not to make a historical Pentagram documentary and expose their music to a whole new legion of fans. If that happens that’s great, but that was never our focus.
DF: I think some people comment that they feel there’s not enough music in the film. But when we met Bobby, it wasn’t a musical, rockin’ time. It felt untrue to have this rippin’ music all throughout the movie because it wasn’t really a rip-roaring rock ‘n’ roll thing going on when we first got there.
I didn’t know the Kiss thing. How much of their lack of above-ground success comes down to the two members of Pentagram refusing to take time off from scrubbing toilets long enough to prep for meeting Kiss?
DF: The best part of that is those are two of my friends who play reenactors, scrubbing toilets, man. So I think about two of my friends scrubbing toilets and hitchhiking, and now, on demand, they’re going to be available in like 15 million homes scrubbing toilets and hitchhiking in dirty onesies.
According to Kiss, which members of Pentagram had too many zits to be rock gods? And which one was the member who was too fat?
DA: It’s funny, we really tried to dig deep into that story and Paul Stanley doesn’t remember. But that’s not surprising.
DF: Yeah, we’ve been through the grapevine—not that we’ve spoken with them in person, but we’ve been trying to get to the bottom of that ever since. And we’re not sure.
DA: We definitely know it happened.
DF: It totally happened.
DA: It definitely wasn’t a made-up story. I just think in the heyday of Kiss in the 70s there’s probably a lot of things they don’t remember too clearly.
I’d never really thought about how much care Kiss must have invested in their own skin. With all that makeup they must have had to be pretty zit-vigilant.
DF: Yeah.
Pellet says, ‘Bobby is completely surrounded by the chaos that he creates, but it sucks everybody else in it that’s around him.’ Did that happen to you as well?
DF: I think it certainly did. Making a film is tough, but the toughest part of this project was getting sucked into the human hurricane that is Bobby. And when I say sucked in, you know, entering this situation that’s really intense, and entering it with compassion for people. I worried about Bobby. I worried about his parents. I worried about Pellet. I saw how desperate people can get and I saw how excited they can get when goals were there to be attained. I saw how sad people can get when those goals were missed. This film went on for like four years and the stakes were really, really high. The stakes are much higher than most rock docs. It’s not just a movie about gettin’ back up on the stage and getting the old dudes out to play your hit no one ever heard. It’s completely about life and death.
At one point Bobby is showing you this sort of glorious flu-fever of a ruffled gold shirt and he says, ‘You can’t out-flamboyant that. That’s a motherfucker, isn’t it?’ And then he says he gets a lot of his performance clothes from his mom. Has Bobby Liebling been performing ‘Livin’ in a Ram’s Head’ in his mom’s clothes all this time?
DF: I’ll bet you 80 percent of Bobby’s most wicked performances were in Diane’s clothes.
Did you get close with Diane and Joe?
DF: Totally. I still talk to them all the time. Diane is a complete sweetheart. She’ll call me—she’s in her 80s now—and she’ll call me and she’ll start talking about black metal and heavy metal. She’ll keep up on Bobby’s career and she’ll say, ‘I’m not sure, do you think Bobby should be wearing eyeliner or not? I think it’s good. I think it looks wicked.’ She’ll start talking to me about Mayhem. Like Satan black metal bands. It’s awesome.
I was going to ask you if his parents are into metal. His dad seemed to be quite proud of Bobby’s music in a way you wouldn’t expect from a man who worked for eight Secretaries of Defense and was apparently dubbed ‘Little Kissinger’ by Government Executive magazine.
DF: I don’t think Joe’s into metal.
DA: I think Diane is definitely the quintessential mom. Whatever her son is into, she fully supports it. She is the mom. I think Joe, we highlight in the film a little bit that contention between the life that Joe probably wanted for Bobby and the life that Bobby ended up with. They rolled in very different circles and they had very different expectations. Joe probably had very different expectations for his son. You know, here he is all these years later and he’s this distinguished guy with this pretty amazing past, and he lives in a crack den. It was heartbreaking in a way because you really feel for these people. They have put themselves—they’ve gotten put in this situation. People will call them enablers and things like that. But the other end of that is this is their only son. It’s very easy for an outsider to say, ‘What are you doing? Just let him go. Kick him out yourself because he’s just poison.’ But that’s their son and they have to make their decision, because ultimately that could mean the death of their son. I don’t know a lot of people who can make that judgment call for another person. We touch on that a little bit because I think we all have the same questions that everybody would, which is ‘What are you doing? How could you let it get like this? How could you let him run your life the way he does?’ I think they both have really good answers. And I think Joe has probably the best answer, which is, ‘Everybody says, “Move him out of your house,” but it’s my son.’ They understand what it means when they kick him out of that house. That they might not ever see him again. So that’s pretty heavy to have to do.
Would you call Bobby more egomaniac than gentle soul or vice versa?
DF: It depends on which day you get him. He can really be a gentle soul. When he’s trying to do life stuff and he’s trying to get things together, he can be a gentle soul. He can be manipulative. He’s been a crack addict forever. He can be a rock god because it takes that—to do what he does on stage it takes that kind of confidence. He can be sharing. He can yank his records out. I could be down there for a week and he’d share every record with me and get so excited about it. Then you add drugs into the mix and withdrawal from drugs and all that stuff, and everything’s really volatile.
Did Pentagram inspire your own band?
DA: They’re definitely an influence of ours, no question.
DF: For me, Vincent [McAllister]’s guitar playing, his guitar tone back then is some of my favorite. It’s a perfect mixture of kind of technical solos for the time but also gets kind of out of control, which is really beautiful.
At one point Bobby puts in writing that if he ever smokes crack again you guys would inherit all of his records. Without giving away what happens, were there any particular records that you would really, really love to have?
DF: Oh man. The rumor is that he has, I mean these goofy, obscure records but he has one of the original Randy Holden Population II records, which is crazy. Flipping through there, he’s got all those old 70s records that record geeks are searching for now. He, Geof [O’Keefe, Pentagram drummer], and those guys, they were buying them when they came out. I’ve never met any adults who bought that shit when it came out. I know everybody’s diggin’ for it now and everybody’s got a story. But the day the new Captain Beyond record came out, Bobby and Geof were at the record store. The day the new Sir Lord Baltimore record came out that nobody else wanted to hear, Bobby and Geof were fighting over the one copy at the record store. Some of it might be a little scratched, and it’s been through a few wars. The first day we walked into Bobby’s house he had a 13th Floor Elevators eight-track sittin’ there. I’ve never seen that stuff.
You’re going to kill my editor. He’s going to show up at Bobby’s house tomorrow morning.
DF: A beautiful thing about this film is perhaps on the outside it looks like it’s a rock doc, it looks like it’s a heavy metal movie, but seriously every time someone out of the demographic sees the film they love it. We have great conversations; it happens at all the film festivals. I’d love to just say that. People, whether they know Pentagram or not, really seem to check into this film somehow.

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I don’t buy into this concept of “music scenes” dying. There’s always gonna be young people and they’re always gonna be kids doing rock and roll and the only people thinking it’s dying are dying old farts. Call me a revisionist but I can’t help but notice all those people who say that “death of the scene” crap were the “first wave” of these rock and roll acts and they simply count their prime in audience attendance the real “height” of whatever was going on. It’s like punk rock senioritis or something where they snub younger acts that sprang up and just basically smack them in the face and ignore their achievements. It’s bullshit. Don’t trust old people. Fuck them.

Fortunately, KILL ALL REDNECK PRICKS is a documentary that isn’t painting the 60′s, 70, and 80′s as a golden era but instead showcase acts from the 90s the privileged few refused to forget. Not to say it’s better than what went on in the 2000s and whatever is going on NOW. But it’s a fresh take for band that many say never got their due. It consists of interviews by the two surviving members (Scott Jernigan, the drummer, died in a boating accident) and a whole slew of semi-celebrities like Kathleen Hannah and K Record’s Calvin Johnson. (Okay, so they are the MOST “famous” people in the documentary.)

I first listened to Karp YEARS AFTER they broke up but they are easily one of my favorite bands ever. They were hands down the heaviest band K Records ever put out. They were quite bizarre and astonishing for a band to come out from Tumwater, Washington with that sound and then get surrounded by pansy melodic art rock acts in Olympia, Washington. They were the band that gave art fags a pair of balls. They never rode the coat tails of the Seattle grunge explosion because they were too busy screaming
about Captain Crunch and pie. (Yes, pie.)

This documentary might not be an accurate depiction of the reality that was behind Karp and their story (the only people who know that are the guys who lived it), but KILL ALL REDNECK PRICKS tells their story that others forget to mention on VH1 who simply narrate to the major label victors of history. This was Bill Badgely’s first documentary and I have to say he made a great refined documentary after four long years in the making. KARP recently had a screening at Hollywood’s Cinefamily but you can get your copy of the DVD (which includes two video recorded live sets) here.

—Taeil Kim

Director Sion Sono started out as a poet and staged guerrilla experimental poetry street performances with his Tokyo GAGAGA collective before making films about brutal murders, twisted families, and demonic hair. His latest film Cold Fish, a twisted tale about a struggling fish store owner who falls into the dark orbit of a rich, charismatic—and murderous—owner of a successful high-end fish shop, screens at Cinefamily this weekend. He’s also in production on his first English-language film, Lords of Chaos, which follows the Norwegian black metal scene in the early 1990s—a scene which spawned a wave of murders and church burnings across the country. He speaks here about crime and creativity, pervert power, and his own cult experiences. This interview by Lainna Fader.

The serial murders that drive the plot of Cold Fish were over dogs in real life, but in Cold Fish, your characters are murdering over tropical fish—why did you change dogs to fish for the film?
I thought fish would be visually beautiful, and I kind of liked the fact that those tropical fish can be surprisingly dangerous in spite of their visual beauty. I thought it could be a good theme for the movie. A realistic movie like Cold Fish has to be depicted beautifully. If it’s a fantasy, I pay a lot of attention to colors—how to use colors beautifully.
You’ve said you’ve always loved films but felt you were too shy and withdrawn to actually make movies. How did you overcome that?
I started out as a poet, writing poems, but then I stopped doing it. It was boring to write on a piece of paper, so I wrote my poems on different surfaces—on the street walls, lavatory walls, and such—and shoot them with an 8mm camera. And soon I turned the camera on me, shooting myself reading poems as well. So I started making films without even knowing I did at all.
After working in film for a couple decades, do you think you’re better suited to being a filmmaker rather than just a writer?
Next year, I will start over as a poet, once again. I’d like to shoot a film and write poems. I want to do all kinds of things.
You said that with Love Exposure—a four-hour epic about love, lust, religion, cults, guilt, and revenge—your ‘shell exploded’ and now you have no more love nor hope nor god, and all you have is sadness, despair, and darkness. Did working on Cold Fish cheer you up?
Depending on the situation I am in at any given time of my life, my movies become completely different. When I made Love Exposure, I was very much in love. And I filmed Cold Fish when life felt extremely disappointing for me. So, you see, it all depends on the circumstances. And I am happy now.
Are you more attracted to the brutality of the murders in your films, or the artfulness of the murders? What’s the overlap between crime and creativity?
I’ll give you a hint. If I see blood—real blood—I would be shocked and disgusted, but I love blood if I see it in the movies. The crimes committed in the movies are such creative trickery that I enjoy them very much. I would hate the crime in reality, but I love to commit—create—crimes if it’s in the movie world.
How much of Love Exposure comes from your own experiences?
The film is based mainly on a true story, an experience of a friend of mine. He is a real pervert, you see. He loves sneaking shots inside skirts. And it is a fact that his sister actually joined a cult and he did take her back with his own hands, with his pervert power.
How can you use pervert power to rescue someone from a cult?
The funny part of it is that my friend persuaded his sister saying, ‘Come back to my world’—meaning ‘get out of the cult back into the “normal” world—but I know him well enough to know that ‘my world’ in his case is the world of perverts! The cult may be weird, but he is just as weird. That’s the funny part of it all.
The Zero church in the film is a highly structured corporate-like cult—why would someone want to join a cult like that? What are they looking for?
They all say they are in search of God, but I think they are actually looking for something else—happiness, or a ‘connection,’ so to speak. In Japan, all kinds of connections and relationships are falling apart, including family ties. You can’t trust your own father. Nor your mother. Who can you trust, then? You need something or someone else. That’s where a cult comes in, as a link or circle that one can belong to—as a kind of replacement for family.
Why are family relations in Japan so weak these days?
Well, how are they in America?
I wouldn’t say they’re breaking down necessarily—there’s a wide variety. The extremes balance each other out.
In a way, Japan is more or less the same, I think. I hope I am not creating bad impressions of Japanese people by saying these things about them. I am not saying that Japan has lost it all, obviously—what I mean is that the loss of connections—family ties and human relationships can clearly be perceived as a phenomenon—not that Japanese people are all fallen apart in a mess.
You’ve said you’re in the Jesus Christ fan club—but not a fan of Jesus Christ. Why?
I find Jesus Christ very interesting purely as a person, just like I find John Lennon very interesting. I may not join Beatles Fan Club, but that does not mean that I am not a Beatles fan. It’s not like one has to be a member of Beatles Fan Club to be a Beatles fan. Same thing should apply to Jesus Christ.
Your first English-language film is Lords of Chaos, which follows the Norwegian black metal scene in the early 1990s, a scene which spawned a wave of murders and church burnings across the country. Why did you want to make a film about that story?
I thought that it was an event that truly represented all the themes I had worked on in the past. It’s about the boys who burned down the church to the ground. The irony I find very interesting in it is that they actually believed so much in God that they had to do that. They hated God so much that they burned down the church, but the flip side of the coin is that they would not have done it unless they believed in God so much. You can’t hate a God you don’t believe in, and I don’t think there are many people who believe in God as much as they did, to be able to hate God so much. One does NOT resort to such drastic measure of action for something one doesn’t believe in.
Varg Vikernes—who was convicted of the stabbing of metal band Mayhem’s guitarist Euronymous—has been opposed to the book and now to your movie, even threatening to kill you. How do you cope with such threats and do such events impact the filmmaking process?
I’m not worried. The film isn’t just about him—his opinion doesn’t matter to me.
You’ve called Ozu—one of the most revered directors in Japanese cinema history—the anti-Christ, the anti-God—why? How does Ozu’s legacy in Japan impact how you make films?
He is too much of a ‘god’ in Japanese movie history, and the history can not be refreshed unless we become anti-Ozu. I have nothing personal against him, but I have to declare I am anti-Ozu in order to move forward.
How’d you feel when people started drawing comparisons between his work and yours with family drama Be Sure To Share? What were the reactions like in Japan?
People told me that I grew up unexpectedly. I felt like making a ‘normal’ movie for a change, so I made one using standard, typical techniques, so to speak. It’s like a punk band covering a Frank Sinatra tune for a change.
I read about how when you ran away to Tokyo to 17, you met a woman in a park who wanted you to go with her to a hotel so she wouldn’t have to die alone. What did you think when she said those words to you?
I was afraid. For several years, I suffered from the trauma—kind of scared of women and all.
Did you think the woman was really going to kill you?
Yes. She had these gigantic scissors—shears. I really believed it.
And she agreed not to kill you if you pretended to be her husband?
Yes, that’s what happened. I went with her to see her family. I was so patient that I got awarded, as a gift, with some money to go back to Tokyo.
You said at the time you were lonely and wondering whether you were a criminal—what did you decide? And what did you mean when you said you’re ‘prepared’ to be a criminal? Do you think most people who commit crimes go into them feeling prepared to be criminals?
At that time when I was making Cold Fish, there was a possibility that things would get criminal right away, but now, after having made films such as Guilty of Romance and Mole, my heart is a little more peaceful now and I don’t feel that way at all. There are strange cases in this world. I did research when I made a movie called Suicide Club. People who commit suicides are not really prepared—they themselves don’t even know they are doing it until it happens. For instance, someone goes to a supermarket and buys something. While carrying it in a bag, this person suddenly feels like dying. Or someone is having a business meeting. In a corporate building. He walks out onto the veranda during the break. Then, huh? ‘Where is he?’ people ask. He is already gone. Some strange suicide cases happen like that, totally unprepared—totally without warning. Likewise, there must be criminals who commit crimes totally prepared.
When you came back to Tokyo, you’ve said you joined a cult so you could eat. Why did they still let you in when you said, ‘If I believe in your God will I stop being hungry’? Was it not important to them that you shared their beliefs?
It was when I had no money and I was hungry. At the station, if you told them you believed in God, you could get some food. It wasn’t so dangerous. Since that’s not something I could possibly believe in, I didn’t feel that I might be brainwashed so much anyway, regardless of the length of time I stayed there.
Why—and how—did you leave?
It was—well, kind of boring. So it wasn’t easy to stay there in that sense. And in order to get out of the place, I had to go to another powerful place—another cult.
That cult let you off the hook because you said you were joining an even bigger cult? How does that work?
I can’t really explain it without getting into a big trouble.
When you went to Berkeley, why did you only study B cinema?
Until then, I was a typical film student, so to speak, studying classics like Truffaut, Godard, Nouvelle Vague, American historical movies and such, but as I got to see tons of those vulgar, nasty movies in Berkeley, I realized that this was the kind of movie I had better be studying now. I got a chance to absorb and study the kind of movie I used to hate because of the nastiness of it.
You said Suicide Club is your B movie, and that the Japanese public should hate it—why did you hope the Japanese would hate it? Do you want to be hated?
My original intention was to make a movie to be detested. I always intended my first entertainment movie to be detested by people rather than entertaining people. ‘Amanojaku’ in Japanese is exactly what I am … How shall I put it in English? I can think of it only in Japanese. If, if, if the content of Suicide Club was something people would like—if everyone else was making movies similar to Suicide Club, I would have been making love romance movies. I just like to do things contrary to others.

SION SONO’S COLD FISH SCREENS AT CINEFAMILY ON SAT., AUG. 6 AT 10PM AND SUN., AUG 7 AT 6:30PM AND 9:50PM. $10 / FREE FOR MEMBERS / ALL AGES. CINEFAMILY.ORG.

When Genesis first met Lady Jaye, Genesis had just spent the night sleeping in a friend’s S&M dungeon. S/he woke up to see a beautiful young woman wearing an exquisitely-coordinated 1960s Mod outfit walk into the dungeon, and then take off her clothes and change into an equally remarkable set of fetish gear. This episode would foreshadow the rest of their story, where love at first sight, romance, and nostalgia would blossom simultaneously with explorations into radical sexuality, gender nonconformity, and transhumanism.

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is a new documentary that tells of the love affair between Genesis P-Orridge, prankster, artist and pioneering experimental musician, and Lady Jaye Breyer, performance artist, cabaret performer, and professional dominatrix. Several years into their marriage they mutually decide to undergo a series of operations in order to look like one another. They get surgeries to alter their noses and chins. Genesis gets breast implants, which s/he happily shows off to the camera. The motivation is partially a testament to their love, partially an exploration of self, and partially an art project. The pair desire to create a third entity between themselves, the Pandrogyne, that would live separately as a combination of the two of them.

Lady Jaye died suddenly in 2007, leaving Genesis behind to carry on their projects and to tell their story. Genesis narrates the documentary, leaving Lady Jaye a distant, enigmatic, but ever-present figure. We see the couple spend an afternoon in Central Park, rehearse with their band, look through their wedding photos (they both wore drag). In a willful anachronism, the film is shot almost entirely in 16mm, rendering Genesis and Lady Jaye’s world in the valentine hues and velveteen textures of celluloid film grain, complimenting the intimate, home video nature of the footage.

While this story would lend itself nicely to an anthropological, sociological, or political film, director Marie Losier mostly lays these issues aside and focuses exclusively on the romance. This approach leaves a few gaps by the end of the film’s brisk 72 minutes: we don’t see much of Genesis’s relationship with their grown children, nor do we get more than a glimpse at Genesis and Lady Jaye’s other art projects or even their flaws or personal struggles. It’s a lovely story starring complex characters, but one told without much conflict.

In the end, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is an idealized portrait of a loving marriage, one as loving as the ideal of any “normal” relationship, albeit one between extraordinary people. It poignantly captures two lovers united in the contradiction of their love affair: they express their radical individuality with the ultimate consummation of sameness. They find a love familiar in its shape but dissident in its architecture. Their love questions its gender and shouts its own name.

—Charles Mallison

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First came post-punk cult hit Border Radio and then came Sugar Town, a film about the music industry, aging rock stars, and the women in their lives.  Now Strutter, the final chapter in Allison Anders and Kurt Voss’ unexpected trilogy, is well underway.  Allison and Kurt have been friends since UCLA film school and even share matching tattoos of the girl in chains on the back of Leonard Cohen’s first album. This interview by Lainna Fader.

Congrats on the successful Kickstarter campaign for your new film!
Allison Anders: It’s pretty amazing!
What do you think about the fact that Strutter is entirely funded by the community? Why aren’t more artists doing that?
AA: I don’t know. They’re missing out. It’s a fantastic thing. We really enjoyed the whole process. Not only do you get to take creative control over your entire project, but the process of raising money this way is also creative. It keeps you in this creative space instead of—
Kurt Voss: That’s absolutely right. Absolutely true. I was just watching Abel Ferrera’s commentary track to Bad Lieutenant and he started musing on a scene and talking about how working in Hollywood system—everything about it made him feel uncreative. It took him away from—destroyed—well not to be too hyperbolic about it, but I feel the same way. What Allison said resonated with me. That approach to raising the money flows naturally into the next step of the project almost. It’s very liberating—it’s like getting a second first film.
Why aren’t artists good at funding their own projects? Are they any worse than any other group of people trying to raise money?
AA: Exactly. Most musicians and filmmakers and artists, they’re at their worst trying to raise money. And affix a value to their project. ‘Why should I invest in your record?’ or ‘Why should I invest in your movie?’ Well, that’s the one thing that artists are particularly bad at. That’s the way that the system works in Hollywood. Inevitably you go ‘Oh, my project has no value.’ Then, ‘If I have Brad Pitt attached, then I’d have value.’ Well that’s bullshit! Absolute bullshit. The thing is it’s just not true, as we see repeatedly from the box office. It should not have to be that you have all these other attachments to get to your project to make it valuable. Maybe the value for our project is $20,000. I don’t know!
I was going to ask you about that—your target was $17,500, which seems awfully low for a feature, even when you’re shooting digital. How’d you settle on that? Just because you had to affix some kind of specific value to the project to list it on Kickstarter?
KV: We just picked the lowest number we could think of to finish a ninety-minute piece.
How far into Strutter are you?
KV: We start shooting in Feburary. The trailer online on the Kickstarter site—we made it special for the page, without having shot anything else for the film. We made it just for the fundraising process. But it also was a laboratory for working out ideas for the picture.
AA: Helped us bring in ideas for the film.
KV: But in terms of the low number for the budget as we were discussing earlier—to add onto Allison’s thoughts about needing a cast member to make a movie valuable—I always liked artists or filmmakers who abandoned the idea that you need money to make money in film. Those are some of my heroes.
AA: Like Herzog.
KV: Yeah, those who dare to plow ahead, like Herzog. The talent and will is more important than money. Famous Herzog story is when they asked him to write the script for Nosferatu, he said all he needed was two boxes of paper. So that’s how we arrived at our $17,500—that’s how much we need for the paper!
I was kind of shocked when I watched the trailer because I recognized Flannery Lunsford. I didn’t know he even acted. I went to elementary school with him, and haven’t seen him since.
AA: How amazing!
KV: What’s that high school, Al? Where all our kids came out of? Is it Marshall?
AA: Oh yeah. Marshall.
KV: I think most of our cast came from there. He and his bandmates went there. They all came out of Marshall. Flannery’s an amazing guy.
AA: Didn’t I meet you over at the Silent Movie Theatre?
Yeah, I worked there for a few years.
AA: Not only did they contribute to our Kickstarter drive with memberships, but they’re letting us shoot there.
You’re shooting there? When I worked there there’d always be people coming in and shooting things but I never saw anything of it.
AA: One of our characters will be working at the Silent Movie Theatre!
And you’ve got Dante from Dante vs. Zombies in the film too right? I met him at a bar in Echo Park a few months ago through a friend who I think used to be in a band with him.
AA: ‘I met Dante at a bar’—that’s really good. That’s a good quote.
Why is he in your film?
AA: Well Dante, I met through my daughter Tiffany, who met him through Jessica Espeleta. His band Starlite Desperation played our festival, Don’t Knock The Rock, about four or five years ago and we invited him to participate in a Gun Club reunion, which was a concert coinciding with the premiere of Ghost on The Highway: A Portrait of Jeffrey Lee Pierce and The Gun Club. They opened the festival with the premiere of Kurt’s movie and then Dante sang with the original band members.
KV: Yeah, it was kind of a pass-the-mic kind of format. Everyone was great but Dante really smoked. He gave an especially memorable performance. He was really very hot. Talented guy. We’re excited about him as an actor.
How’d you know he could act though?
AA: He has a little bit of experience. Same with Flannery. They’ve both done a little bit. They’re fairly new, but not totally inexperienced.
Do you look for musicians who are also actors, actors who play music or are just passionate about music, or someone with a little experience in both acting and music?
KV: That’s a stack of questions! But casting can go a number of ways.
AA: It helps if they all have bands.
KV: But in general, you introduce musicians into their first role.
Had John Taylor [Duran Duran] done anything before?
AA: He had never acted before.
KV: We put him in Sugar Town with no acting experience. He’s a musician who just fit the bill.
Have you ever made a movie without a musician?
AA: I don’t think I’ve ever—and I don’t think you have either, Kurt—made a movie without a musician. He’s even had Ice-T in one of his movies! We’re never without musicians as actors. It just gives us a little extra—an immediacy that musicians can bring to a role, and if you put them with professional actors like we did in Sugar Town, it can be really amazing. Like Rosanna Arquette working with John Taylor was really amazing. She was brand new and guided him every step of the way and yet he made her more immediate. She gave him the chops and he gave her the ability.
KV: Their scenes together are 85% exquisite in that movie. They’re very good. And you’re right, it was that mix and her generosity that made it. That was a great pleasure. And I always thought he should be the next James Bond.
That would’ve been amazing.
AA: Oh yeah, for sure! They really went down the wrong path with Daniel Craig. I think it should have been our Mr. Handsome, John Taylor from Duran Duran.
Yeah, he’s pretty handsome…
KV: If you go all the way back to Border Radio, we didn’t know what we were doing when we started that movie and neither did any of our musician actors. We chased them all down because they were the most attainable marquee value you could imagine. These people who had their name in the paper but were still approachable in nightclubs.
AA: And they were our idols too.
KV: So it all came together on that project.
Kurt, I read an interview about Border Radio where you were saying that you and Allison have really learned your trade since you made that film but you’ve also lost something in the process. What did you lose?
KV: I think one thing specifically that Allison and I continue to marvel at when we look at Border Radio is some of the exquisite landscapes and post card shots. A lot of horses on the beach. A lot of things that are largely a function of the time we had making the movie. You know, like hanging out in Mexico for a week or two and being there when stuff happened rather than squeeze a whole production into 17 days and having to shoot X number of pages per day. Then it becomes like cutting sausages. That’s what I think we’ve lost.
AA: And in that particular scene too—I’ve got to say, that scene with the horses—I don’t think I’ve ever really had anything but there’s just a couple of things like the guitar burning in the sand on the beach—moments that we had that were magical and unfortunately you just don’t get in a regular production because there you run into things like, ‘Oh, you need to get a permit for that’ and ‘Oh no, we can’t just run and grab that.’ It’s really infuriating. It takes so much out of the creative process.
KV: We’d wait around for four hours on the beach waiting for the right lighting. Can’t do that when you’re on a proper schedule. With this film, we’re going to go back to that. More cinema, really. And that’s part of the irony too—you do that with next to no money.
Will you borrow locations again too?
AA: Yeah, with some stuff in Echo Park, some in the Valley, some in the desert. Basically the same Border Radio haunts.
Are you going back to the Hong Kong Café?
AA: Oh! Wouldn’t that be something?
KV: Yeah, sure would! It’s still there, wonder if the doors are still open.
I heard you told some stories to get out of paying to shoot. How’d you convince them to shut down to shoot your film?
AA: Oh God, what did we tell them Kurt?
KV: That’s totally fallen off my hard drive. I have no idea.
AA: It’s really amazing, we really paid for nothing on that film.
KV: Someone must’ve hooked us up somehow. It’s not like we snuck in—they opened up their doors to us in the afternoon and we brought a band in. Maybe Chris D. or Dave Alvin called in a favor.
AA: At that point I don’t think they still had bands playing anymore. Are they even open anymore?
KV: No you’re right, I think they did close. That would’ve been cool to revisit though.
AA: It was a pretty incredible place back in the day. You could turn around and see David Bowie watching a band on stage. I remember seeing Danny DeVito of all people there watching X or something.
Did you see X when they came to the House of Blues a couple weeks ago? They played Los Angeles in full and screened The Unheard Music.
AA: Oh, fantastic! Wow. Wonderful. John Doe was—they were making that movie when we were making Border Radio.
What was your first encounter with John Doe like?
AA: I’ll never forget it actually—
KV: Oh I bet you won’t!
What does that mean?!
KV: She had such a crush on him back in the day.
That’s so cute!
KV: He was so cute! Now that I look back on pictures of him. He was such a dreamboat.
AA: I bet Kurt had a crush on him too.
KV: Fine, I had a man crush on him.
AA: He came to Malmuth Hall at UCLA to see some of the footage we had shot. Right Kurt?
KV: Sounds plausible.
AA: We had already shot something with Chris D., I think, and John Doe wanted to be in the movie. That was what I was hoping for, actually. Cause John Doe and Dave Alvin were in the Flesheaters at that point. That was their side band, with Chris D. So we met through Chris D. After seeing them a zillion times, at the Hong Kong Café—I think I was there that night that John Doe first saw the Blasters. It was quite an amazing show.
KV: And the way we met Chris D. was just by walking up to him and giving him a script.
How did the Gun Club steer your life in the right direction?
AA: It’s funny, I was just talking to someone through eBay today about the Gun Club today. I have a present for Kurt. I actually saw them for the first time before Terry was in the band. So I actually saw that first show, before Terry Gram and Rob Ritter joined the band. Then after that, it was just completely amazing. For me, it was that they had a quality different from other bands in L.A. They had the punk with the more rootsy Americana music to it. That’s why it holds up so well now. You can play any of the songs off Fire of Love, which is on so many people’s ‘Best Records of All Time’ lists. It’s timeless, really. Kurt and I used to go see the Gun Club together. They were his favorite band as well.
I was reading an interview you did, Allison, where you said, ‘Digital is the freeing device for women.’ How is digital more freeing than film and why is it more freeing for women than men?
AA: I felt like when I started working with digital—and I shot Things Behind the Sun on digital—that the language of working with digital, as opposed to working in film, is so much more accessible. In film school I’d always hear these guys walking around talking about film in a very nerdy way, a film nerdy way, and it seems so completely male-dominated. A ‘no girls allowed’ kind of thing. It’s not that we couldn’t learn that language but it seemed inherently exclusive. When digital came along, everything was open. The language of it is warmer and friendlier and anyone can access it. It felt like there was no more ‘boy’s club’ anymore. Open to anybody.
You’ve also said a female director mythology is starting to develop. What’s the mythology? Why is it developing now?
AA: I think that for a long time there was—well, after the silent movie period, because in the silent movie period there are annuals where you can see women directors, but women disappeared from the movie industry as directors with the talkies. You’d hear a lot about about ‘The Boy Wonder’ but not ‘The Girl Wonder.’ Things are so much better now. It’ll be interesting to see what happens now that Kathryn Bigelow broke the barrier. She really fought her entire career to not be trapped in some girl filmmaker ghetto. It’s so wonderful that she got the Academy Award. I feel like there’s so much more access now for women filmmakers. And I don’t even know if there needs to be a girl filmmaker mythology though, but there’s an open area now where you can be a wonder in yourself.
What does it mean to be a wonder in yourself?
AA: You can go with your own voice. I think there’s plenty of young women filmmakers who stand on their own. They don’t have to dabble quite the same way like I worried we were going to have to. For a while there were a lot of riot girl filmmakers—Sarah Jacobson—well not a lot, but a few that I thought were going to make a kind of new movement. Really audacious young women. And I think there’s a certain level of that still out there, and I think that helped save us. It’s been a long time coming, culminating in Kathryn [Bigelow] getting that Oscar. I don’t think there’s anyone who says ‘women can’t make films’ anymore, but things are still not great yet.
Yes there are. The person who introduced us is one of those people—one of my first interactions with him was him telling me that there are no good female directors. It was infuriating and insulting.
AA: Oh my God! Oh my God. I’m going to bitch at him all over the place. Unbelievable. Well, there’s definitely a male…fanboy part there still that doesn’t think women directors have much to offer. Or female guitarists. I remember Chrissie Hynde [singer/guitarist of The Pretenders] reading her thing ‘We have yet to have a female Jimi Hendrix—Why not?’ I mean, she had a really interesting argument for that. Not an argument, but a hypothesis. My daughter thought it was partly true as well. A lot of great male guitarists start playing at adolescense and play sports and channel that athleticism and put it into learning guitar. And that girls often are able to talk out all their stuff with each other, and are on the phone a lot, communicating together a lot, and using language more during adolesence than doing physical things like playing guitar.
KV: And the guys are going to all that trouble just to get girls. Why can’t we all just get along?
AA: And girls are wondering why the guys won’t put down the guitar! And instead the girls should be picking up the guitar.
KV: It’ll happen. It just takes that one girl and then the archetype will enter popular discourse.
AA: That’s the key. It just takes the one and the archetype enters. And that’s what will create ‘The Girl Wonder.’

ALLISON ANDERS’ GAS FOOD LODGING AND MI VIDA LOCA ON TUES, FEB. 15, AT CINEFAMILY, 611 N. FAIRFAX AVE., LOS ANGELES. 7:30PM / ALL AGES / $10. CINEFAMILY.ORG.