CREEMDIA
In the first five minutes of Alan Sacks’ Rock 'N’ Roll Movie, Ray Sharkey (as filmmaker duBeat-e-o) looks at a likeness of Joan Jett and reverently intones. “You’re the toughest. You cut a road through the rock ’n’ roll forest that Blondie, Benatar, and Chrissie Hynde walk on.”
CREEMDIA
Thru Joan's Past, Cheaply
John Ned Mendelssohn
In the first five minutes of Alan Sacks’ Rock 'N’ Roll Movie, Ray Sharkey (as filmmaker duBeat-e-o) looks at a likeness of Joan Jett and reverently intones. “You’re the toughest. You cut a road through the rock ’n’ roll forest that Blondie, Benatar, and Chrissie Hynde walk on.”
One wonders if screenwriter Marc Sheffler has ever heard of Brenda Lee, Honey of the Honeycombs, Janis Joplin, SuZy Quatro, or any of several hundred other trailblazing rock ’n’ roll women in the same breath with whom La Jett won!t deserve to be mentioned on the best day of her life.
Rest assured, though, that producer/director Sacks, heretofore best known as he who transformed a Gabe Kaplan comedy routine into Welcome Back, Kotter “doesn’t have that feeling [about Jett] at all. But I do think that she’s a real artist, and I’d love for her to think, ‘Boy, they really did wonders with that stuff,’ when she sees our movie.”