The Runaways

There's a movie coming out about the Runaways. (It's called, with typical Hollywood panache, The Runaways.) I have mixed feelings about them. They're the same age as me, and started playing rock music at 14, in LA, which is good, and probably had a chance to meet Jimmy Page when they were prime Jimmy Page-fodder, which makes me jealous and hate them.

I've been keeping an eye out for the film, even though it's about 30 years too late to be relevant (I guess like me in Jimmy Page-fodder terms) and apparently it's about to burst upon our screens shortly, directed by no other than Floria Sigismondi, with the under-age girls played by Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart, among others. I don't know who plays Kim Fowley, but it's probably the Zombie Jonathan King. Their meteoric rise to mild buzz status and their equally rapid fall into drugs, infighting, confusion and disarray is chronicled by the movie, as movies are wont to do with rock.

But wait! What is this the producer is saying about why he chose Sigismondi to direct the film? Art Linson, of Fight Club and Fast Times at Ridgemont High says, "We felt from the beginning that this is really a tale of two young girls" — Cherie and Joan — "getting in way over their heads in a world they knew very little about, a man’s world, and there’s a price to pay for that," he said. "We thought: It’s got to come from the heart of another woman." (From the NYTimes article here.)

He thinks only 'another woman' can understand this premise.

It's like 1940 out here in Hollywood sometimes.

There are fourteen gazillion eight jillion and six biopics on male wannabee rock stars. (I counted.) In 96.375% of them, the boys want to be stars and get in over their heads, get abused by their managers, end up with a drug habit, in confusion and disarray, go through the Dark Night of the Soul and emerge as sober individuals. (In the remaining 3. 625%, they die at 28 from the drugs.)

Even It Might Get Loud has a Dark Night of the Soul section, for old time's sake, even though everyone in it is an established star who by definition pushed through and made it.

In pretty much all of those movies the boys got in over their heads in a world they knew little about. In not one of those movies (I checked very carefully) does anyone say that they "got into a man's world" and "there's a price to pay for that". Nor did the premise require the director to have a vagina, or for that matter any other variety of wedding tackle.

But now we know. Girls, don't ever attempt to break into any man's worlds. There's a price to pay for that!