October 6th, 1999
Longtime friends and UCLA film-school colleagues, Allison Anders and Kurt Voss scraped together $50,000 for their first feature, 1987's Border Radio, a gritty portrait of the L.A. punk scene that put them squarely in the middle of the burgeoning independent movement. Both have found consistent work since, with varying artistic success. Anders' intimate trailer-park melodrama, Gas Food Lodging, was a breakthrough at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, and her subsequent films—notably the Echo Park slice-of-life Mi Vida Loca (1993) and Grace Of My Heart (1996), an ambitious look at The Brill Building, New York City's pop-music factory in the '50s and '60s—have placed her among the country's most prominent female directors. Voss has been more of a journeyman, primarily making genre pictures for cable and video, including star vehicles for Molly Ringwald (Baja), Alyssa Milano (Below Utopia), and Ally Sheedy (Amnesia). Anders and Voss' shared passion for music led to an aborted biopic on Germs singer-songwriter Darby Crash, but their collaboration has been successfully revived with Sugar Town, an ambitious and knowing survey of music-industry fringe-dwellers. Real-life musicians such as X's John Doe, Duran Duran's John Taylor, The Power Station's Michael Des Barres, and Spandau Ballet's Martin Kemp bring an authentic flavor to the Nashville-esque proceedings, with Sheedy, Rosanna Arquette, Lucinda Jenney, Beverly D'Angelo, and Jade Gordon ably rounding out the ensemble cast. Anders and Voss recently spoke to The Onion.
The Onion: You wrote Sugar Town in a week. How were you able to do that?
Allison Anders: You know, it wasn't that hard, really. We outlined for about four days, and then from there, we sat in a room together—one on a laptop, one on a desktop—put on some tunes, and went.
O: So you had the characters in mind and knew where you were going before you started?
Kurt Voss: We had actors in mind, and that informed the characters and dictated the plot, really. If all these musicians [John Taylor, Michael Des Barres, and Martin Kemp] are in a band together, then it must be a really bad band.
O: Was that a little touchy? Was it difficult to ask these former '80s rock stars to play washed-up '80s rock stars?
KV: It was a little when we first handed over the scripts. We took a deep breath, but everyone was really cool about it.
AA: And it was great, because they also felt like they really knew these characters. They weren't really playing themselves, but there were certain elements of themselves in there.
O: Sugar Town struck me as similar to Grace Of My Heart in that it's a sort of parallel history of rock 'n' roll. How would you describe the differences in terms of the characters' relationship to the industry?
AA: Well, I guess with Grace Of My Heart, we stay with one character more or less, following the woman's journey from songwriter to singer-songwriter that emerged in the late '60s and early '70s, and you actually follow that history. In this, the history of the '80s bands is off-screen.
O: It seems in both there's this idea of the music industry being monolithic and controlled.
AA: Exactly. I think that's very true. My daughter [Tiffany Anders] is a musician, and it's just wild to see some of the stuff she goes through. It's not unlike what I go through, but before she entered into it, she was raised by a feminist mother. She was like, "I can do anything. It's not harder for girls!" And that's bullshit: It's a lot harder for girls! And then, on the other hand, it's also easier, because if you do get the breaks, you can probably have a really great career.
O: The Jade Gordon character strikes me as a fairly unflattering reference to Liz Phair.
AA: Oh, cool! [Laughs.]
O: Was that your intent?
KV: Are there specific biographical similarities?
O: I think almost certainly.
AA: She kind of looks like Liz Phair.
O: Yeah, exactly, and there's one reference in particular to Exile On Main Street [an album Phair's debut, Exile In Guyville, uses as a jumping-off point].
AA: Oh, right, I hadn't even thought about that. This is so funny, because different people have said different musicians, but this is good, because now I'm finding out this good dirt on all these women musicians. [Laughs.] [Gordon's character] was definitely a type. It's an old story in a way, this ambitious girl with dubious talent.
KV: Well, it's All About Eve, isn't it? But I had a different model in mind.
O: Who would that be?
KV: Just another woman who stepped over a body with a song in her hand.
O: There's also something in the film about the music industry not being able to sustain a career. There's this worry that on the tail end, there's not going to be anything for these musicians.
AA: Right. Maybe that's why the rock world makes for such great drama, because there's always this looming tragedy at the end. Or this, "What'll I do now?" Or this double-edged sword of being on VH1's Where Are They Now?
KV: It's a little intensified in pop music, because the climate changes so quickly, but it's kind of like that in the arts, period. William Burroughs talked about how, if you're the greatest asshole surgeon in the world, that's what you do. No one starts saying, "Well, that was last year. What about eyeballs this year?"
AA: Never do you have that in any other kind of work: "Well, Farmer John, I was really disappointed in this new one. I really thought he was going to make this kind of crop, but he gave us the same thing he did last year." [Laughs.]
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