Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains finally sees the light of day

One of the greatest rocknroll films you never saw is finally being re-released. So why should you care?

By Sheba White
Published: September 16th, 2008 | 11:00am

Until recently, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, was one of the greatest rocknroll movies you never saw and one you were never gonna see. The Lou Adler-directed film had been shelved by Paramount shortly after its 1981 premier when studio executives walked away from the movie perplexed. In an attempt to salvage what the studio saw as Adler’s caustic take on the music industry, they asked him to re-shoot the ending, which he did to scathing reviews. Adler, who had previously directed Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, and was a well known record producer, band manager, and label owner in his other life, was so dispirited by the process that he never made films again.

The Fabulous Stains probably would have stayed on the shelf had it not been for the hijinks of a TV series called “Night Flight” on cable’s USA Network. “Night Flight” periodically broadcast the movie during its four-hour, late-night programming, permanently etching the minds of its perennially drunk, up-all-night, and slightly skewed audience with the story of the Stains, a trio of Johnstown, Philadelphia, girls who had run off from their flood-ravaged town to join a caravan of junkie has-been American-metal rockers (the appropriately named band the Metal Corpses), pissed-off English punk rockers (the inappropriately named band the Looters), and one dread-swinging Rasta-man bus driver (the offensively named tour manager/philosopher Lawnboy), as they traveled across North America on tour.

OK, so in print it reads like the makings of a movie that should go along with the green swirls of Cheech & Chong smoke, the furtive churning of after-party gut rot, and the semi-coherent thought patterns associated with late-night viewing. What made this movie survive was its unsentimental view of the minor-league rocknroll world and the revolutionary idea at the time that three inexperienced, untrained young girls could just decide to become a rocknroll band (the Stains) and do so well enough to draw a substantial cult-like following of similarly skunk-attired fans while garnering media attention with somewhat comical and cheesy statements like, “I don’t put out.”

Roll your eyes all you want and point to a dozen films that have covered the same topic since, but this was 1981, folks. The Go-Gos were just on the brink of going the pop route and signing to I.R.S. (in April 1981). MTV wasn’t even the smallest blip on the American screen (programming began August 1981). And two of the lead actresses (Diane Lane, Laura Dern, and Marin Kanter) were barely in their mid-teens. In fact, Dern had just turned 13 on the first day of shooting. Lane, who was convinced to do a naked, shower-sex scene and wear see-through blouses, which “Night Flight” never edited out, was 15. Only Kanter at 20 (looking eerily like Carrie Brownstein in both expression and onstage composure), was of an age where the sex scene and drug overdose scene wouldn’t have been an issue, but well … it was a different time.

These and many other reasons — such as early performances by Christine Lahti, and Brent Spiner (Star Trek’s Data) not to mention the unbelievable cast of musicians-turned-actors that included the Sex Pistol’s Paul Cook and Steve Jones, and the Clash’s Paul Simonen (as the Looters), and Fee Waybill and Vince Welnick from the Tubes (as the Metal Corpses), and the most realistic performance ever done by an actor-turned-musician with 24-year-old Ray Winstone’s performance as the emotionally stunted Looters frontman — added to the reasons why this barely seen film became a cult classic. Reasons, part two: it was written by Nancy Dowd (though she later asked to have her name removed from the film citing harassment charges against the crew), writer of Slapshot and Swing Shift, and costumed by ex-Clash manager and photographer, Caroline Coon, not to mention that seminal folks from that time period seemed to all have their hands in this film during its Vancouver filming, including legendary punk photographer Bev Davies, English band the Who (the final concert scene is actually a Who audience), and once Dowd left, Jonathan Demme stepped in and co-wrote the script.

So beloved was this film by the late-night and slightly odd cinema crowd that poorly shot bootleg copies continued to sell on eBay, MySpace pages went up in support of the characters, and tribute Web pages were created. It wasn’t until DIY director (Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore) and longtime Stains fan Sarah Jacobson came along that Paramount finally started to listen. Jacobson spent a great deal of her time and energy trying to get this movie re-released on the art-movie circuit and created a much-loved documentary about the film in 2000 for the Independent Film Channel, only to die of cancer in 2004, before the slow Paramount wheels started to chug forward.

Yet, the September 16 Rhino DVD re-release of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains is the culmination of 27 years of consistent campaigning on the part of fans like Jacobson. Despite its seamier elements — the slapped-on ending (shot some two years after filming) with its precursor MTV video showing the girls as sold-out pop stars or “finally successful” musicians (depending on your take), for instance — the film still holds up as one of the best movies ever made on women in rocknroll and is a stunning tribute to women-penned films, strong women-led roles, and women-fronted music groups.

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junkpunks (about 1 year)
This is a FABULOUS movie. I have always wondered if this is where the White Stripes got their name from. If you watch it with that in mind you'll see what I mean.