“We want to start where we began,” Tina Weymouth said.

“He kept us alive,” Weymouth said of the inscrutable club owner. “He fed us and he supported us in every way possible.”

“He told us we needed to expand our sound and get a little more interesting,” she said. “And he taught us a lot about ethics, about how to treat people.”

One of the best moments in CBGB involves Talking Heads. The band takes the stage in the nearly empty dive and launches into “Psycho Killer.” And then Kristal and the handful of listeners catch each others’ eyes, as if it’s just now occurring to them that they’re watching something historic.

The testimonies from Weymouth and David Byrne are shown during the closing credits of CBGB, but — bizarrely — we never see Kristal, (played by Alan Rickman) interact in any way with the band. He doesn’t even talk to them — much less feed them or teach them about ethics.

And that’s sort of the pattern of the entire new film CBGB: fabulously interesting figures from the history of punk and rock pass before us, but we pretty much never see any real human interaction between those musicians and Kristal, the man responsible for so much of their future success.

Sure, there were a lot of major stars who came out of CBGB, and not all of them can be fully realized characters in a feature film.

But only rarely does the script allow any of those musicians to live and breathe, even for a moment — rarely do they become more than just mimics or caricatures.

Later in the movie, as Kristal, now manager of The Dead Boys, tries to respond to the stabbing of Johnny Blitz, he yells at Stiv Bators (Justin Bartha) and Cheetah Chrome (Rupert Grint):  “Iâ€m not your father! Iâ€m just your manager! I canâ€t do this anymore!”

Huh?

We haven’t seen anything remotely paternal in Kristal’s relationship with the young punk band. The sudden outburst comes from somewhere out beyond left field.

The lack of human contact between Kristal and the musicians is perhaps the most puzzling of all the choices in the script by husband and wife team Jody Savin and Randall Miller (Miller also directs).

The poor character development is especially notable in the brief appearances of Iggy Pop (Taylor Hawkins) and Lou Reed (Kyle Gallner), both of whom come across as self-obsessed buffoons.

Terry Ork (Johnny Galecki) gets even worse treatment. A band manager, label owner, and something of a visionary, Ork was largely responsible for Television and deserves considerable credit for putting both the band and the club at the vanguard of American music. But in CBGB, all we see of Ork is his slightly smarmy attempt to get the band on stage and his offer to give  Iggy Pop a blow job.

So, if we aren’t seeing Kristal interact with the musicians, what takes up all the screen time?

Ashley Greene as Hillyâ€s daughter Lisa is especially unlikable. We donâ€t see a single moment of true warmth between father and daughter, and there’s even an embarrassing moment when Greene seems to be channeling Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny.

Twice in the film, characters fall asleep with the water running, flooding the floor below. Really?

We’re treated to several uninteresting scenes with Kristal interacting with a stereotypical cop.

The club might have been legendary for Hillyâ€s dog Johnathan taking dumps everywhere, but dog shit jokes wear thin pretty fast on screen. Ditto for jokes about rats and roaches.

And do we really need to see a montage sequence of a character buying a pair of boots?

The filmmakers have tried to deal with the episodic nature of the script by using comic book imagery reminiscent of Punk magazine to leap from one scene to another. At first this seems like a clever framing device, but it quickly wears thin, further diminishing the already shallow story.

But the music is at least great, right?

The film uses studio versions of classic songs even when there are existing live recordings from the club — raw renditions that might have given CBGB a much-needed jolt.  (Click here for a post with a number of live videos from CBGB’s early days.)

And, inexplicably, hardly any of the performance scenes in the film continue for more than 30 seconds without being interrupted by distracting dialogue, running jokes about the club’s seediness, or other extraneous elements. Viewers are given only the briefest of chances to immerse themselves in the music; we never have a chance to feel either the innocent wonder or the sordid seediness at the heart of the story.

I could go on and on.

As negative as this sounds, I’ll say that I didn’t find the movie boring — it moves too fast for that.

And there are a few touching moments here and there, and a few stirring musical sequences, and I don’t think I could ever get tired of watching Alan Rickman, who famously made drinking tea a work of art.

But you’ll likely walk out of CBGB feeling like you felt after one particularly mediocre night at some second-rate club.

You’ll feel like you just missed all the good stuff that surely must be going down at some other club down the street — one with better music, better sex, better drugs, and better conversation.

These shots begin with a couple of evening shots on set, including one of Alan Rickman talking to famed Savannah producer and ice cream man Stratton Leopold, and another of Estelle Harris.

The rest of the pics here were from one of the less exciting days (and, as I recall, one of the hottest) on the CBGB set on West Congress St. last July in Savannah.

You’re seeing Alan Rickman as club founder Hilly Kristal on the ladder talking to Terry Ork (a fabulously interesting music promoter and band manager played by Johnny Galecki), who is with the young members of the great band Television, played by Max Reinhardsen, Evan Alex Cole, and Luke Dressler.

Then Ork is walking out of the club to speak with Kristal and Merv Ferguson (Donal Logue).

This moment — the one when Ork gets Television onto the CBGB stage — could have been one of the most interesting and dramatic in the movie.

But I’ve got more.

This morning around the house I’ve been listening to Television, one of the earliest bands to develop a synchronous relationship with the iconic Bowery club owned by Hilly Kristal.

I had quite a lot to say about Television in a previous post in which I mentioned Terry Ork, played by Johnny Galecki in CBGB, the openly gay producer whose Ork Records released singles by Television, Alex Chilton, The Feelies, and others. Ork is hardly a household name — he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry! — but he was one of those figures who just made things happen. (Click here for a nice picture of Ork along with other key CBGB figures and the actors portraying them.)

Ork died in 2004. From Richard Hell’s website, where he refers to the deaths of other old friends including Bob Quine:

We’re very sorry to hear of the death on October 20th, in San Diego, of Terry Ork. He’d been ill with cancer for a while. Richard says, “Good grief. That’s three this year. What is up? We’re not that old. I saw Terry a couple of years ago when he was in New York for a little show of some art he’d made. He was laughing a lot, as always. He’s about the only person I can think of who whenever I think of him it’s with a big smile on his face. I actually got a longish email from him the day before he died. I’d written inviting him to speak at the Quine memorial. What to say about Terry? He was a troublemaker, and some of the trouble he made was the band Television–he suggested his blond boy Richard Lloyd as second guitar which made the live band possible, and he gave us his loft to rehearse in which made it probable. He had lots of shady dealings. He ended up in jail for a while. He was a movie freak. That’s how Verlaine and I got to know him — he was managing Cinemabilia in New York when we worked there. Godard was his main man, and Guy Debord. When I left the Heartbreakers he brought out my first music release, a three song EP featuring ‘Blank Generation,’ on his new Ork Records. He’d started the label one EP before that, with Television’s ‘Little Johnny Jewel.’

Here’s a shot of Johnny Galecki as Terry Ork, talking to Hilly Kristal (Alan Rickman with the curly hair) and Merv Ferguson (Donal Logue).

And here’s a lot of Television, which we may not ever have heard were it not for Terry Ork:

And check out this great song off Television’s 1992 self-titled album:

There’s a regrettably cloying soundtrack behind the video, and I’m a little surprised that Ackerman treats Deborah Harry and Blondie as absolute synonyms.

Still, there are a few images from the set that give a little sense of the look of the film.

From ET’s Malin Akerman Feels Pressure Playing Blondie

Fresh off of her musical role in Rock of Ages, Malin Akerman returns to back to the music scene in the upcoming film CBGB. However, this film is based on a true story, and she will play the role of punk rock pioneer Blondie, which pressures her to execute an accurate portrayal.

“There is so much pressure to do it right,” Akerman said. “I’ve been watching copious amounts of YouTube videos, interviews, and stage performances…There’s such a huge…population in the world who know who she is and who watched her, so you want to get it as right as possible. There is, obviously, pressure. You want to do her justice, so hopefully she’ll be happy.”

Television is frequently described as “punk”, but I think that’s a reductive description of the sound. But you can decide for yourself if you listen to a few of tracks embedded at the end of this post.

The 1973 band members were Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, Richard Hell, and Billy Ficca. Hell left the band in 1975. (Btw, Verlaine recently played guitar on Patti Smith’s “April Fool” on her new album Banga.)

Television was among the first bands to play CBGB.

Evan Alex Cole plays Richard Hell in the movie, with recent SCAD graduate Max Reinhardsen as Tom Verlaine. (Reinhardsen was excellent in a SCAD stage adaptation of two Flannery O’Connor stories that I reviewed here.) I don’t know who’s playing Lloyd or Ficca.

And then there’s Johnny Galecki as Terry Ork, whose Ork Records released singles by Television, Alex Chilton, The Feelies, and others. He was Richard Lloyd’s roommate for awhile and was openly gay.

And here’s one of those points where counter-culture scenes intersected — New York’s gay scene and punk scene fed off each other. From a 2007 Richard Lloyd interview at Rock Town Hall:

RTH: Tell me about your days setting the scene at CBGBs.

RL: We needed a place to play. A shithole nobody else wanted, and we steamrolled over the owner, who wanted to have country bluegrass, and we created the worldâ€s most creative rock ‘n roll club bar none. I mean, is there any – I donâ€t care for your Cavern Club, Marquee Club, Whiskey-a-Go-Go, Boo-Hoo-Hoo Club… CBGBs is the most famous rock ‘n roll club to have ever existed and I fucking created it! I was the invisible force behind it, because Terry Ork, my lover – oh, he wasnâ€t, he just chased me around. I mean, after all, he was Televisionâ€s manager. Whoâ€s more interested in the careers of young, delicious-looking men than gay people? After all, Brian Epstein… Any rock ‘n roll manager is one of two things: either a sleazebag, cigar-smoking asshole businessman or a gay person. Iâ€d much rather be managed by a queer. Queers are usually nicer than the other critters that run along the surface of the earth trying to play the game of King of the Hill.

Here’s more on Lloyd, Television, and those earliest days of CBGB from Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk:

Well.

I have not read the CBGB script and have no idea how or even if it will deal such sexual undercurrents.

Anyway, here’s a selection of Television tracks, beginning with a handful of early recordings before Hell left the band (I think). If nothing else, be sure to listen to the first one, a demo of “Friction”, which also appears on the album Marquee Moon below:

Here’s the full 1977 album Marquee Moon:

Here’s the track list for Marquee Moon:
1 00:08 “See No Evil”
2 03:56 “Venus”
3 07:45 “Friction”
4 12:26 “Marquee Moon”
5 23:04 “Elevation”
6 28:10 “Guiding Light”
7 33:41 “Prove It”
8 38:40 “Torn Curtain”

And check out this great song off Television’s 1992 self-titled album: