By Rodger Grossman, director of What We Do is Secret
(October 2008)
The Origin
I grew up in Los Angeles and started going to punk shows in 1982. The first punk record I bought was a Germs record called "What We Do Is Secret," released not long after Darby committed suicide.
Punk Rock profoundly changed my life. I saw a lot of Black Flag, Minutemen, Saccharine Trust, Meat Puppets, Fear and Circle Jerks shows. But I never saw The Germs, a band that loomed large in the consciousness of the scene.
Darby was featured prominently in Penelope Spheeris's outstanding documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization, which was a very important movie for me. I watched that movie countless times on the Z Channel (a local cable station here in Los Angeles that showed incredible independent and foreign films).
Years later, when I graduated from the American Film Institute Director's Program, I wanted to make a movie that set the tone for the films I wanted to make. I wanted it to be highly personal and with the intensity of the movies that inspired me: The Decline of Western Civilization. Apocalypse Now. Clockwork Orange. Repo Man.
These movies were all pretty hardcore. About intense people in intense situations. And one day it hit me: Why not make a movie about Darby Crash and The Germs? I knew it would be a challenge, but I had no idea how big a challenge it would be.
The Journey
One of the most unique things about this project is the number of obstacles it had to overcome to get made.
The subject matter alone made this an extraordinarily difficult movie to make. It is a punk rock, period piece, performance musical with a large cast and big set pieces, about a gay iconoclast that intentionally kills himself with a heroin overdose. I cannot imagine a movie that fits less into the Hollywood mold.
In fact, I think the only thing "Hollywood" about this film is that we were lucky enough to shoot some of the scenes there (when we could afford it).
Clearly this was not a studio film, but it had to have a certain scale to effectively tell the story. So the road to production was unbelievably arduous, with the project coming together and falling apart many times at many different companies.
There was a seemingly endless stream of producers and actors and financiers who made commitments to be involved in the project, all with their own stories and drama, but perhaps the most dramatic was the woman from Texas who promised to fund the movie at a relatively luxurious budget of $3 million.
She actually did start writing checks and we went into pre-production. We cast the film, hired all the crew, secured all the locations, et cetera. We spent $500,000 of her money, and then she disappeared, the day before we were supposed to shoot. Ultimately, we had to shut down the film - without shooting a frame of footage.
A couple years later, we raised more money and went back into production. It wasn't easy, because people remembered the first production had been shut down and were understandably wary.
This time, we had far less money, and shot only 75 percent of the film before we ran out of money again. We then had to scrape together money from a lot of different sources, and a year and half later we shot six more days, with very few of the original crew but most of the cast. A huge challenge.
We were still editing the film when we were accepted into Dramatic Competition at the Los Angeles Film Festival, but we still didn't have enough money to finish the movie! In fact, we couldn't afford a film print. We screened digitally.
We were very fortunate to sell the movie to an outstanding company, Peace Arch Entertainment, after the executive Larry Greenberg saw the movie at LAFF. It was only then, after the sale of the film, that we had enough money to finish it.
Was it Inspiration or Collaboration that Got the Film Across the Line?
In the case of this movie, we needed both. And lots of it! And we were extremely fortunate to have both. This film attracted extraordinarily talented people on every level, including the producers, the cast, the crew and the original members of The Germs themselves.
When I first started this project, there were no books on Darby or the L.A. punk scene, and it was hard to find people willing to speak about this very important and painful chapter in their lives.
I conducted interviews with Brendan Mullen, owner of the first Los Angeles punk club, the Masque, and I worked on the script with Michelle Baer Ghaffari, Darby's best friend. Michelle is also a producer on the film.
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