CREEM GOES TO THE MOVIES
At CREEM, we appreciate cinema. We live for immersion. We savor the escape. We get giddy when the lights of the theater dim, the smell of popcorn fills our nostrils, and we once again indulge our kink of shushing our loved ones during the previews.
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CREEM GOES TO THE MOVIES
WE’RE PACKING A PURSE FULL OF CONTRABAND MILK DUDS AND SOME HOT TAKES TO SPARE. LET’S GET INTO IT!
At CREEM, we appreciate cinema. We live for immersion. We savor the escape. We get giddy when the lights of the theater dim, the smell of popcorn fills our nostrils, and we once again indulge our kink of shushing our loved ones during the previews. As teenagers, we'd eagerly gather in the parking lot of the local multiplex, stacking ourselves under a single trench coat to pay single admission for whatever Batman was playing. As adults, we still bask in movie magic. We know every Fast & Furious by heart, have spent literal years of our lives taking in the Avengers oeuvre, have watched enough YouTube videos about Dune to have formed some very strong opinions about it, and fully intend to eventually see Tar!
As film aficionados who dabble in putting out a rock magazine, we jumped at the opportunity to combine our passions. As we put this package together, we endeavored to combine the peanut butter of rock with the chocolate of cinema, just like Oppenheimer (which we also plan to see just as soon as Netflix relaxes its new draconian account-sharing rules). This actually turned out to be pretty easy (just like in, if we understood the previews correctly, Oppenheimer). We got John Carpenter to talk about music, Andrew Eldritch to talk about movies, and some punk kid from the same state as Hollywood to talk about the greatest soundtrack CDs to ever bless a cutout bin. And we found a bunch of pictures of famous people and—aspiring Roger Cormans that we are—took some extremely cheap shots.
Finally, in a total coup, we reached out to our personal hero, Penelope Spheeris. And wouldn’t you know it, she told us an anecdote about how she borrowed a lil’ spark of genius from her 1987 punk Western Dudes (an unsung film that we recommend on its merits, but especially if you’ve ever fantasized about Fear frontman Lee Ving shooting RHCP bassist Flea in the head) to breathe life into the most iconic scene from Wayne’s World (an anecdote that we are definitely not including here because it was cut from the profile but is too good to leave out of the section entirely):
“They’re in this Volkswagen going across the desert,” she told us, connecting the dots from Mitzvah to Mercury. “John Cryer is driving and Flea is in the passenger seat, and they’re headbanging to 'Hava Nagila.' It was a really cool scene, and I knew it would work. And so when it came to me shooting 'Bohemian Rhapsody’ in Wayne’s World, I threw the guys in the car, put on some playback and let them have it, and asked them to bang their heads. Everybody knows that Mike [Myers] kind of pushed back on it cuz they hurt his neck. Everybody else had fun. What can I say? I stole it from myself."
Drawing heavily from one’s early, edgier work in the service of hopefully giving life to a franchise that would otherwise be forced to coast on brand recognition and a vague nostalgia for some mythical rock ’n’ roll past? We have no idea what that’s like. But we thought it was a cool story. Like Oppenheimer said, when he famously quoted his favorite Kula Shaker song (again, haven’t seen it),
