aus fanzine 3
"Experimentation is the only way to live"
Interview with Penelope Spheeris
by Paul Malcolm
Los Angeles, November 2nd, 2006
Whatever happened to Penelope Spheeris? It depends on which Penelope Spheeris you're talking about. The Spheeris who directed the seminal punk rock documentary DECLINE AND FALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, the definitive account of Los Angeles's punk scene in the late 1970s, is still alive and well, if struggling to get herself recognized over the Spheeris of later studio pap such as THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES and THE LITTLE RASCALS, who, it turns out, may never have really existed at all.
Hollywood can be a tough town to maintain your identity in, especially if you're never sure where you really belong in the first place. Which brings us to yet another Spheeris, the awkward outcast UCLA film student who made a pair of remarkable student films in the earlier 1970s, I DON'T KNOW and HATS OFF TO HOLLYWOOD, that plumb the personal desires and heartaches of the transgendered Jimmy/Jennifer as she makes her way through Los Angeles. Like their central character, the films themselves exist in an in-between state, walking the line between fiction and documentary. Rohstoff asked Spheeris about the films and the period in which they were made as she prepares her next project, a bio-pic about Janis Joplin.
When was the last time that you had seen I DON'T KNOW or HATS OFF TO HOLLYWOOD?
I was actually moving my vault from Hollywood to another location recently and I pulled out some of the old footage and started to look at it. I'm going to put the DECLINE series out on DVD so I was looking for old DECLINE footage and I luckily found a lot of that. But then I found the student films as well and we transferred them to a more viable master so at that point I did watch them again.
What was your response to seeing them again?
I always say in life that l don't like to go backwards. I very seldom look at my old work. I like to just move forward and make new things. The films themselves are certainly not too much of a downer but the people that are in them, to a degree, are somewhat tragic figures, especially in retrospect. I don't know what happened to Jimmy/Jennifer. I did see him about five years ago on Hollywood Blvd. and he wasn't looking too good. It's a rough life. The other character in HATS OFF TO HOLLYWOOD, Dana, passed away in the mid 1970s.
At the same time, these films are incredible records of that period in Los Angeles, of a certain scene and certain people.
I am glad that they do indeed preserve the era because the kind of underground world that I was living in and dealing with at that time was very obscure and really not visited by too many people that even knew how to use a camera.
In the film I DON'T KNOW we shot a scene at a parade that was the very first gay pride parade in West Hollywood. They called it a Gay Liberation parade back then. Thank god that my instinct was to document it because if you stop to think about it, it is the basis for a lot of contemporary styles and mindset. People today don't know where it came from so if you look at things like these films you can see it a little better. Back in the day I was something of an outcast and I think it was difficult to get through being perceived as an outcast. A lot of the reaction to the films did criticize me for even dealing with the subject matter I was dealing with.
Was that criticisms from professors or students?
Both. There was one acting teacher that was very critical and said, "Why do you have to try and get attention for yourself by dealing with these 'stupid' people?" That's just kind of been trend in my life. When I did the first DECLINE, a woman asked at the Writers Guild of America screening, the first question out of the box, "How dare you glorify these heathens?" And I started thinking that I have to look at where I came from and the work of other people like Diane Arbus. You just have to say thank you for doing that because otherwise we wouldn't know those people.
How did you find your way to these characters, to Jimmy and Linda and Dana, and their world?
Well, Linda is my sister. And she is a lesbian and we had a lot of friends in common. My brother was also gay. Of four kids two of us were gay so I was raised in a world where it was normal. It was just part of my world. When I did the films I was fascinated with Jimmy and Dana because they were so remarkably flamboyant and so full of love and life.
Any other kinds of student films?
There were some politically oriented films. A lot of them were just kind of visual experimentation. Very few, or any others, were dealing with that kind of hip Hollywood underground, transgendered thing.
Your films are also very forward looking in terms of form, in their complex play between documentary and fiction. The films exist in a kind of in between state much like the main characters.
I was really fascinated by that hybrid style. I did another student film called the NATIONAL REHABILITATION CENTER, that I should give to UCLA and the Academy, but it was a mockumentary when I hadn't seen one before. The premise of the picture was that there was a government organization that was gathering up war protesters in internment camps and systematically brainwashing them in a CLOCKWORK ORANGE kind of program so that they'd come out and want to go to war. I did it in a documentary form. I remember at the end of the screening, Paul Schrader, who was one of my contemporaries at UCLA raised his hand and said, "We know these places exist, I don't know why you beat us over the head with it." Well, okay, Paul. But I was fascinated by the form. When I was in film school my very favorite films were from Frederic Wiseman. I was fascinated with the way he told his stories and the way he could take a subject, like for example in BOOT CAMP, and make people on both sides of the issue of army recruitment, for and against, love the film because he told it so objectively. I took a lot of clues from him.
Watching your student work I also thought about Jack Smith and the New York underground of the 1950s and 1960s. Who else were you looking to for models?
Well Cassavetes for one. I was never too much into Frank Capra, Sam Fuller and all those kind of guys. It had to be suited in reality for me to relate to it, and when I say reality I mean in terms of form. There is no reality in terms of subject matter.
Which films or filmmakers were your professors holding out as models? What was in the canon at the time?
The cool thing about film school at that time was that we really got a big cross section and you could make films. I was still always sort of viewed as the odd person who liked the documentaries and everyone else was in the "Tell a Fanciful Tale" camp. The film school gave you film, they gave you all the equipment, you made the film from beginning to end. I stayed there way too long because I loved making movies and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do it if I wasn't going to school. I was the first woman to work in the tech office at UCLA which is the place where they hand out the equipment. They had never let women work there before because they didn't think we could lift the equipment to the counter. So I had hands on, 24/7 access to that equipment.
Was there any support for women filmmakers at that point?
There were very few of us. There was Chick Strand. Joan Churchill was hanging around, Ellen Barker was her friend. To be honest I never even imagined when I was in film school that I could be a director. There were like two women directors at the time and one was in TV and the other was from another country. I thought at best I would either be an editor, maybe a script supervisor, maybe an actor. But I never thought I could be a director. It wasn't until I was out of school that it occurred to me that I could. It was a big day because women just didn't think they could do it at that time. People ask me why I've had such a wide and varied career in terms of the subject matter of my films. It's because as a woman director you kind of take whatever job you can get. I think at the end of the day, when I look back, for most people, my career is perceived as being a successful career. I look back, and this is a terrible admission, but I think of it as a failure. When I did WAYNE'S WORLD, my seventh film and my first studio picture, my life took a turn that I could not rectify. The turn was that I could only make comedies. Men get to do lots of different genres but a woman can only do what she's proven that she's good at. So for me, although it made me very wealthy, it's sort of been kind of a curse, because I still feel poor. And I don't mean to complain because so many of my contemporaries were not able to make films at all. But by my own standards, I wasn't able to do the movies I wanted to do. I got sucked up in this Hollywood bullshit. I didn't realize that I was selling my soul at the time, but I did.
Aren't you being too hard on yourself? The first DECLINE film had a huge influence on suburban kids, it still has ... It opened up a wider world, that you can be this, you don't have to be that. Plus WAYNE'S WORLD is a good movie. – Is it possible, do you think, to look at your student films as holding the seeds for the later themes you would develop?
Not in terms of subject but perhaps in terms of form. The subject hasn't recurred in my later films, although I was invited to make a film about that club Make Up where all the drag queens go. I thought, "I could do that." But I have to pick my docs carefully these days.
Would you want to ascribe any meaning to I DON'T KNOW or HATS OFF TO HOLLYOOD in terms of your larger career?
I think they validate the premise that experimentation is the only way to live. I didn't think of myself as part of an experimental film community. I wish. I really felt that l was out there on my own.
Here's my theory about the world. The world is as it is today because it has been changed by a bunch of crazy people. Galileo, Van Gogh, in film, Orson Welles. By contemporary standard they are nuts. But you have to make that big departure from the norm which would by many standards define you as crazy, in order to make a difference in the world. I don't think that my contribution is that extreme or that important but you get the point. You have to do something that is extraordinarily different to change the world and you have to take a lot of criticism for it.