It’s definitely worth checking out. (Click here for a less interesting but similar piece in Rolling Stone.)
From the piece:
[…] bit by bit, pieces of the actual former club — the bar, the pay phone, the walls and the notoriously foul toilets — were removed from a Brooklyn storehouse, loaded onto trucks and reassembled on a clean, affluent intersection in Savannah, Ga.
Well that’s wrong.
The pieces of the club were assembled at Meddin Studios, out in the industrial area of Louisville Road.
Only the club exterior was recreated on West Congress Street, a short block that includes The Lady & Sons and Sapphire Grill, but also includes The Jinx, Club 51 Degrees, and one of the city’s most prominent empty and dilapidated buildings. The crew set up on an underutilized parking lot. “Affluent”?
Anyway.
A number of impressions, in no particular order:
The piece is a really fun roundup of movies about punk.
The infighting among punk’s key historical figures is interesting — petty, predictable, even sad in some respects.
The piece suggests the inevitable failure of any movie to reproduce the scene to match the memories of everyone who was part of it, or to bring individual characters to life (many of those portrayed are actually still alive, of course):
And yet for all the hard work, once stills and a teaser trailer hit the Web, the switchblades inevitably came out. People are possessive about punk. The original punks are in their 60s now (those who aren’t dead, anyway), a time of life when legacy becomes more crucial than when you’re young, loud and snotty. Taylor Hawkins of Foo Fighters, cast as a blond Iggy Pop, drew particular ire. “I don’t follow any of that,†Mr. Rickman said. “There will be a huge sense of ownership, and in that sense I guess you can never get it right.â€
