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?