Do You Wanna Dance? Allan Arkush Remembers ROCK 'N ROLL HIGH SCHOOL

(Rock 'n Roll High School director Allan Arkush, above. Photo courtesy of NBC.)



by Jon Zelazny

Editor’s Note: this article originally appeared at EightMillionStories.com on April 24th.

Jersey City native Allan Arkush has enjoyed a prolific career in television, currently producing and directing for the hit series “Heroes.”

He started in show business at Bill Graham’s legendary Fillmore East concert theater in New York City, then worked for the equally legendary low-budget movie producer Roger Corman. 2009 marks the 30th anniversary of Arkush’s solo directorial debut, the beloved cult classic Rock ‘n Roll High School.

I met with Arkush in his home office in West Los Angeles, and tried to keep from drooling all over his killer record collection.

Did you go to Springsteen last night? I thought he was amazing.

ALLAN ARKUSH: He really was. I thought it was interesting that he started out with some fairly dark songs: “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Outlaw Pete.”

I really loved that “Spirits in the Night.” First time I ever heard it.

That’s a great one. It was on his very first album.

You must be a fan from way back.

I can remember driving in my mother’s car, listening to Scott Muni on WNEW talk about these new records he’d gotten. He said, “Here’s a guy named Bruce Springsteen, and this is a track from his debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park,” and he played “Blinded By the Light.” It immediately took me. I went out to the record store at the Bergen Mall, and there was that album… and even though I was out of work, I bought it. A couple years later, we were making Hollywood Boulevard (1976) when Born to Run came out, and we just played it to death!

I just got into him a few years ago. I married a Jersey girl, so… you kind of have to get with the program. But I got totally hooked on The Rising. Now as a guy who saw just about every great rock band in their prime, where do you rank Springsteen?

You know, my daughters are rock fans, and they’ve heard me talk about all these legendary performers. I told them what you’re really looking for are those times when a band is in the middle of a tour, they’ve got a great record out, so they’re feeding off that energy, and they’re not just playing as well as they can, but exceeding it… and on that night they are the best band in the world. There’s no empirical way to measure that, I said, but you’ll know it when you see it. Sure enough, we go see Springsteen on his last tour. He opened with “Radio Nowhere,” did two older songs, and then kicked into “Promised Land,” and just blew the roof off the place. Both of my daughters looked at me, and I said, “That’s what I was talking about!”

It reminded me of this Hendrix gig—it was April ’68 at the Fillmore, before I worked there; I was an NYU student. His amp blew out, so they took the top off of his speaker, and plugged in two new amps… and this huge feedback loop started. There was so much power coming off of it, you could feel it in the hairs on your arm. Hendrix sort of grabbed that note with his guitar, and it got louder and louder, and he turned to look at the audience over his shoulder. He was smiling, and he saw this one girl, and he like threw that note to her, and it became the intro to “Foxy Lady.” It was one of the great, primal rock moments I ever saw.

There’ve been times when Springsteen has done “Born in the U.S.A.,” and they finish, and do that section where the band breaks it down for a really long beat, then they bring it back together again… and it’s like everything happens in that section—y’know, birth to death—just like that one note by Hendrix. The Who have done that for me a couple times, or Led Zeppelin, or even The Grateful Dead, or The Ramones. They get to that white heat point where there’s nothing else in the world except those sound waves coming off of them.

Speaking of the Fillmore, there were probably millions of guys back then who would have killed to have your job. How did you score it?

I’d just transferred from Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania—which was all men, and was like in Amish country. I used to read the New York papers, and in The Herald Tribune, Tom Wolfe was writing these stories about San Francisco—which became The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—this Dickensian, ongoing story of Ken Kesey, and the guys who became The Grateful Dead. All of that was so fascinating to me. So I transferred to NYU film school. I was at the Fillmore the night they opened. I think it was March ’68. The very first show was Big Brother & The Holding Company, Tim Buckley, and Albert King… and the tickets were like $3.50, $4.50, or $5.50!
A few months later, a friend of mine literally saw an ad posted in his dorm: “Looking For Ushers -The Fillmore East Theatre.”

That’s it? That’s how you came to witness the cream of rock ‘n roll history?

It wasn’t even my job! My friend took the job… but he didn’t want to work both nights on a weekend! He said, “Ya wanna split it?” I said, “Sure, I’ll fill in.”

So we did that a few weeks, but this guy just wasn’t that reliable, and soon I was working both nights, and eventually I became the leader of an usher group. We took the tickets, and then counted them again in a back room to make sure everything added up. Maybe a year later, I became part of the support crew; I was the guy who brought the beer and soda to the bands. Then I got on the lighting crew—helping out with the light shows they used for the different bands.

We’re talking about the first few years bands were even doing that, right?

Pretty much. Light shows really started at the acid tests; like ’66, ’67. So I did that; I did it in England in ’71 and ’72. In ’73, I came back… and it was all over.

What do you mean?

There were no more concert halls or theaters that did that. Bands started bringing their own stuff.

Aha. So in the early days, it was the venues that provided those services.

Right. And the Fillmore was the premier facility. They had everything. A lot of people who did their lights and sound had studied theater, or they came from Broadway, or off-Broadway. These skills they’d learned to present stage shows were now being applied to rock concerts. All the bands did back then was show up with their amps.

I saw a list of everyone who played there. Did Bill Graham pick all those groups?

Yeah. And put them in those combinations.

http://www.fillmore-east.com/showlist.html

My god, he just had phenomenal taste... and I love how he mixed in the older jazz and blues performers.

Neil Young put out a Live at the Fillmore album a year or so ago, and you can see the marquee behind him. The lineup that weekend was Neil Young & Crazy Horse, The Steve Miller Band… and their opening act was Miles Davis with the Bitches Brew band! For $4.50?! Every night on stage, Neil apologized to Miles Davis: “I’m sorry. You’re the greatest.”

So a few years later, you’re working for Roger Corman. Were you a fan of his stuff?

No, I hadn’t seen that many. I remember The Trip (1967), and The Wild Angels (1966), but a lot of his movies didn’t play in my area. Then I met Joe Dante and Jon Davison, and they had this huge collection of 35 mm prints, and they showed all his stuff to me. That theater on La Brea Avenue used to let us run whatever we wanted at midnight, so that’s where I first saw things like A Bucket of Blood (1959) and Creature From the Haunted Sea (1961), and all those whacky ones.

When you watch Rock ‘n Roll High School today, you know it’s spoofing pictures from an earlier era—you’ve cited one called Shake, Rattle, and Rock (1956)—but I don’t really know those kinds of movies. Were they like cautionary tales? Or just juvenile delinquent melodramas?

I guess you’d call it the high school juvenile delinquency genre. I’d seen High School Confidential (1958)… but it really goes back to If… (1968) being a big influence.

Though If… was an intellectual art film, not a cheap melodrama. So it was a wide pool of influences you drew on… including earlier rock music films?

Yeah, I liked Bye, Bye Birdie (1963) somewhat. I liked some of the Elvis movies. Jailhouse Rock (1957). I really loved The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), by Frank Tashlin. His influence on me at that point was very strong. I’d say Tashlin and Richard Lester influenced Rock ‘n Roll High School the most, in terms of pop filmmaking, while If… gave me the license to take it even further.

Because in those fifties melodramas, authority always prevailed at the end, right? While If… ends with the triumph of revolution.

And that was the time I grew up in. The fifties movies were really before my time. I only saw them later, probably on TV.

Speaking of that genre—whatever it is—have you ever heard of a picture called The Godless Girl (1929)?

No.

I just saw it at the Silent Theater. It’s a Cecil B. De Mille, about a high school girl who’s a professed atheist… and she’s rallying all the kids at school to become atheists!

Wow.

They hold a big meeting—and it’s clearly all the dorks and misfits who are attending—then all the jocks and popular kids come and storm the place, and it turns into this huge brawl. It’s amazing because it’s De Mille, but it’s really hip! A total rock ‘n roll movie… 25 years before rock music!

The Godless Girl. I have to write that down. An older one I always liked was Wild Boys of the Road (1933).

I don’t know that one.

It’s a William Wellman. It’s about these teenagers during the Depression who realize their parents can’t afford to feed them or clothe them anymore, so they set out on their own. Kind of create their own society.

I think the first true rock ‘n roll movie was Rebel Without a Cause (1955), because it was the first movie that was really about teenagers. Before that, teens were just like little adults. The Blackboard Jungle (1955) was the other key one, just because that was the first time people went to the movies and heard rock and roll coming out of a loudspeaker. Most kids had only heard it on these little portable radios.

Ten years later, when the Beatles came running out of the Finsbury Park Astoria in A Hard Day’s Night (1964)—down those stairs, out into a field—that, more than anything, was the feeling I wanted to have when the music breaks out in Rock ‘n Roll High School.

It seems like after the Beatles, a lot of rock groups of your generation did not want to be in “Hollywood” movies… there’s like this ten year gap, where I guess they thought it was too jive. Was that a factor as you tried to mount a throwback rock musical in the late seventies?

That was one of the reasons Todd Rundgren didn’t do it. He connected with the idea of If…, but he didn’t like our story because it was funny. He wanted it to be more like If… So he turned us down. He was the first person we went to.

On the DVD commentary, you describe how Cheap Trick almost got the job. It seems to me they would have fit in pretty well.

Yeah, they had the kind of cartoon image, and the humor.

Weren’t they a lot more famous? Were they already too big for it?

Yes and no. They hadn’t broken big yet. They were working on Dream Police, and they’d done Live at Budokan, but it wasn’t out yet. “I Want You to Want Me” was just starting to get FM radio play.

Meanwhile, The Ramones were strictly a cult band… and there was this very negative vibe about punk music at the time. The Sex Pistols had really poisoned the well: all the magazines and newspapers talked about was the spitting, and the elements that seemed… unclean.
So we were at Warner Bros. trying to find a band. They showed me some of the short films Devo had made, but I thought those guys really had their own concept going. They talked about a band they had just signed, Van Halen, and then somebody mentioned The Ramones, who I’d only read about in The Village Voice. I knew the club CBGB’s, because it was across the street from where we built our lightshow equipment—it was the kind of place you went only if nothing else was open!

So I bought the Ramones’ albums, and I didn’t get it at first; the music I was listening to was much more complicated… but the humor of what they were doing finally clicked. I liked the first album, wasn’t too crazy about the second, but I really loved Rocket to Russia. I still think that’s a genius record.

Yeah, the production sounds kind of muffled on the first two.

Their managers loved the idea of the movie, and when we met the band, they understood the Riff Randall character—she was based on three women I knew from the Fillmore who were these total rock fans—and when I described the ending, how they’d show up at the high school, and be playing as the building went up in flames, they all went, “We’re in! We’re in! We’re doing this!” They totally got that whole wish fulfillment aspect of it.

I still hadn’t seen them play. I couldn’t afford it; I was broke. Somehow I got some money—maybe I was crashing on my father’s couch—and finally saw them at a place called Hurrah’s.
Lance Loud & the Mumps opened, and a guy named Klaus Nomi—this bizarre opera singer, who was one of the first people to die from AIDS. I was in the dressing room afterward, and this guy came in; very drunk, very loud… and I realized it was Lester Bangs! I’d read everything he’d written; he was like a god to me. He was just giving The Ramones a hard time, y’know, being really funny. Then the Talking Heads walked in… and he started picking on Tina Weymouth!

The movie makes The Ramones out to be much more famous than they actually were. I mean, there was no high school in 1979 where a hundred kids would be excited to see The Ramones, was there?

That was my sense of humor. And the band loved it… because at the time, they were opening for Black Sabbath, and getting booed off the stage.


(The Ramones and P.J. Soles, above, in Rock 'n Roll High School.)

I’m sure for a lot of people, this movie was their introduction to The Ramones.

They thought Road to Ruin was going to break them out that year, but it didn’t. And that was a great record. It’s funny; when you listen to their stuff now, you really hear the pop element in it. The Beach Boys influence, the girl group influence.

Roger Corman’s first reaction to the movie was that there was too much of The Ramones in it! He and Frank Marino, his head of distribution—who never really liked me, or the movie—they told me to cut out the middle of every song! I said well, we’re gonna have to remix, and this and that, y’know… Finally they decided it wasn’t worth it to change it. Frank had written the whole thing off anyway. Roger also wanted me to cut down the two scenes where Riff and Kate talk about guys, and I just begged him to let me keep them. I think he finally just respected my passion for it.

How did you get away with not having any tits in it?

There was one shot originally. P.J. Soles did a quick flash. And finally we cut it.

She must have been pleased. I haven’t seen a lot of seventies Corman, but even in the ones Jonathan Demme did—there they are, every ten minutes, like clockwork.

That was the rule. We sure did it in Hollywood Boulevard! The only things that got censored, like when it played on MTV later, was Riff smoking the joint in her bedroom, and the scene in the theater with the guy sniffing coke off the carpet.

The initial theatrical distribution was a joke. Johnny Ramone was so mad: “How can you open a Ramones movie in New Mexico?” He said, “Our first record sold 135 copies, and our fourth record sold 135 copies! That means only 135 people care about us! Why didn’t you open it in New York?”

Roger Corman wasn’t one of the 135. It was probably just a teen comedy to him.

Frank Marino was so pissed off about it, he wouldn’t hold the movie until the album was ready. When it finally played in New York—with basically no support—it did very well in the theaters it was in, but it was really Ebert and Siskel who saved it… with the clips they ran on their show on PBS. Even if they weren’t praising it to the skies, they were laughing about it. They just loved the silliness of it.

I was going to say, the writing… it’s just incredibly juvenile—

Oh, yeah! But funny!

—to the point where you think it was actually written by teenagers. At the same time, the direction is not juvenile at all. It’s very smart. I mean… it’s not as dumb as you’re all pretending it is.

That’s definitely one of the secrets to its success. Audiences have always loved that aspect of it. You know, a lot of the humor was based on Woody Allen. The character of Tom; all his jokes about his ineptitude with girls; those were Woody Allen riffs.

Except Tom isn’t a nerd. He’s a beautiful, blonde California surfer type… and he’s the captain of the football team!

That’s the joke! That was our revenge on those people. I was always interested in hierarchies. Social hierarchy. That’s why I wanted to have one girl who’s in love with Tom, and another girl who’s in love with Joey Ramone, and show them as equals.



Who was cast first, P.J. Soles or The Ramones?

The Ramones. And we had the writers on set the whole time—Russ Dvonch actually plays the freshman who gets stuffed in the locker—

So they weren’t much more than teenagers.

They were 23. Just out of film school. Anyway, the more time we spent with The Ramones, the more things we could incorporate about them into the story. It was funny at first because they were all so quiet. Especially Joey.

Yet you can clearly see in their scenes that P.J. genuinely likes him. There’s real warmth there; it’s very sweet. Joey even looks bashful sometimes.

He was so nice. She had them all over to her house for Thanksgiving.

So much of her dialogue is hilarious. When she talks about how she loves the way Joey eats pizza—

She came up with that herself. It came out in an improvisation. The other line I always loved was Mary Woronov’s, “Do your parents know you’re Ramones?”

She’s absolutely perfect. Every comic impulse is spot-on.

Mary and I were friends for a long time; we still are. She was part of that whole Warhol scene, you know. She danced with The Velvet Underground! If you watch Hollywood Boulevard and Death Race 2000 (1975), you can see the evolution of that character.

I forgot she was in Death Race. I saw a lot of these movies when I was younger, but they’re not things I go back to.

I’ve got a whole bunch of copies of Hollywood Boulevard. I can let you have one… it’s not like people are fighting to get their hands on them!


(HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, which Arkush directed with Joe Dante, above.)


Thanks. I was thinking about the story structure in Rock ‘n… what?

It sounds funny when you say that. “The story structure.” There really wasn’t any!

But in terms of how you alternate between plot, comedy, and musical numbers, it conforms pretty closely to standard Hollywood notions about musicals. You don’t say much about musicals on the DVD; was that a genre you also knew inside and out?

Yeah, I knew musicals very well. The Bandwagon (1953) in particular was a huge influence; it’s probably still my favorite Hollywood musical. “Do You Wanna Dance” was really my homage to that. I remember talking to the cameraman about lighting that number so the colors really popped out. There’s more front light in that hall, and the posters on the walls are more colorful. That’s why I’ve got the band coming down the hall on that riser as everybody breaks into song; it was as close as I could get to that old style.

“Do You Wanna Dance” clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcsVOFh-Ipo

I loved Meet Me in St. Louis (1947), A Star is Born (1954), all the Busby Berkeley stuff, the barn raising number in Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954)—

That’s a great number. The rest of that movie is pretty dull.

Yeah, I can’t remember much else about it.

I don’t think Rock ‘n Roll would hold up without that understanding of musicals. It’s really the foundation that anchors all these other influences.

Oh, and “I Want You Around” was an homage to Julie London’s “Cry Me a River” in The Girl Can’t Help It.

That’s my favorite scene. It’s also interesting how you use very few cuts. Rock music is synonymous with fast cutting, but that scene works beautifully without it.

My other favorite moment is The Ramones’ arrival; both on the car, and when you have them do that slow, methodical walk down the sidewalk. Rock bands in movies are always positioned somewhere, like they’re on stage, because it’s realistic, but you created a truly cinematic moment—the band advancing toward us. What inspired that?

I liked the idea of them working their way down that line. I’d seen so many lines of fans outside the Fillmore; it just seemed like the right thing to do. Now that you mention it, though… you’re right; it wasn’t the most obvious choice.

It’s a simple idea, but it looks so cool!

I wanted to briefly touch on Get Crazy (1983), a comedy you based on your experiences at the Fillmore. I assume Daniel Stern’s character represents you after you’d been there awhile, while the younger guy is a version of you when you first started?

Everything in that movie is based on real stuff, and I wish I could remake it as a realistic movie. But the only way I could get it made at the time was to do the Airplane! version of it. My second film, Heartbeeps (1981), had been a complete failure, and I was desperate to do a movie about something I really knew and cared about.

There was this small company called Sherwood Productions that had some capital. We had meetings, and they liked my idea of a comedy set in a theater like the Fillmore. Airplane! was really big then, and what they wanted was that kind of whacky comedy. We started working on the script… and I realized during that process that the executive, Herb Solow, was pretty much of a jerk. Whatever I’d suggest, he’d counter with another suggestion. It was just the way he was: everything he heard, he said “no” to… but he would take the germ of what you said, and put his own spin on it.

Ah, the dreaded “creative producer.”

The part of the little sister was supposed to be played by Mariska Hargitay, who was so beautiful, you wanted to fall on the floor. Herb wanted Stacey Nelkin. We wanted Jerry Orbach to play the owner; he was much more like Bill Graham. Herb went with Allan Garfield. Every role, there was an argument. He actually talked me into Daniel Stern in the lead instead of Tom Hanks… who was hilarious, and I think he’d only done “Bosom Buddies” at that point. So it was one stupid decision after another. Then the company was taken over by David Begelman, who was already on his way down. In the end, they never really understood the movie, and the scam they came up with to release it was to sell the shares in it to some Wall Street tax shelter group, and then put it out so it would lose money… just like The Producers (1968)! So nobody saw it—on purpose! It was so horrible to work so hard on something, and then see it just thrown away.

The audiences that saw it didn’t get it. They didn’t understand how there could be a rock concert with all these different kinds of acts. My take on it? It’s a movie with three thousand punch lines, but only a thousand jokes. There’s too much zaniness, and not enough human comedy. It’s just too bizarre.

I respect it as a comic portrait of the music business, made by someone who was there… just as Almost Famous (2000) was Cameron Crowe’s personal impressions of that milieu and that era.

I love Almost Famous. Especially the director’s cut box set. It’s just brilliant. I used to read his articles in Rolling Stone; I loved this one he did on The Allman Brothers, because I knew them, and his take was dead-on.

You guys both have great affection for that world. As opposed to, say, Lester Bangs, who clearly grew very bitter and resentful about rock stars towards the end. Do you think you and Crowe just kept a healthier distance from it… or maybe weren’t as judgmental?

I’d say so. The rock stars I remained friendly with, like Joey Ramone, were really nice people. Or with someone like Jerry Garcia, who I knew for a long time—I wouldn’t go back to the hotel after a show and hang out with them, party with them, y’know? I’d go to a show, talk to him a little backstage, and then I’d leave. Or he’d come over to my apartment if he was in town, and we’d watch movies together.

But Get Crazy was really kind of the end of my movie career. Luckily, rock videos happened right around then… and then I got work on the TV series “Fame.”

####