OK, we all heard the rumor that Shane West (the not-so-bad-boy from ” A Walk To Remember” with Mandy Moore) would play seminal L.A. punk figure Darby Crash, short-lived singer of the Germs, but we never really thought such a thing would come to pass.
Not only was West cast, but the movie, “What We Do Is Secret,” has been shot and is in the can and premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival over the weekend. Wisely, West was intuitive to realize he’s never going to please everyone (or possibly anyone?). He told the LA Times, that playing Crash would be a “losing battle in general. I’m not ignorant enough to say that I could duplicate Darby’s madness, intelligence and wit. But I became close with his family and friends, and that was the validation for me.”
The legendarily self-destructive Crash flamed-out extremely early: he overdosed on heroin at 22 and his death was overshadowed by John Lennon’s death that happened earlier the month of December, 1980. Though his life was shrouded in mystery, apparently his death was premeditated.
“He had a five-year plan to make his mark and then commit suicide, thereby ensuring his legend, ” director Rodger Grossman said.
Back to Shane West. The twenty-something star was so committed to securing the Crash role he actually went on tour with the reformed original Germs members as the singer. Before this, West petitioned the Grossman hard; he endured three rounds of undoing dental prosthetics and actually helped out the filmmakers with a cash advancement to finish the film. How much? “Well, let’s say — a Ferrari [worth]. And uh, a small car,” West sort-of joked.
Apparently Grossman has been working on getting the Germs/Darby Crash story to the screen for 15 years. “This script was rewritten more times than probably any script I know of,” he said. Despite working on a shoe-string budget, one key coup came when Germs guitarist Pat Smear (and ontime Nirvana/Foo Fighter member) and Grossman wrote a letter to David Bowie, convincing the English rock icon to license his epochal “Five Years” and “Rock and Roll Suicide” to the production.
Crash (born Jan Paul Beahm) romanticized fascist leaders and Grossman tried to use this to comic effect in the film. “Hitler used to have his architects make two models of the same building,” Crash tells a friend in one revealing moment in the film, “one to see what it would look like when it was built, the other after it was destroyed.”
Nylon TV has a decent video interview with cast members Shane West and Bijou “I Want To Be A Good Girl” Phillips (she plays the Germs’ Lorna Doom) and original band members Lorna Doom and Pat Smear. Most interesting, is the tidbit by Phillips who said the film was all, but completed with only a few scenes left and financing fell through (as it had many, many years before; David Arquette was originally going to play Crash) and the cast had to wait an entire year to film the last few scenes (We think it’s totally amazing/hilarious that “Spanish” from Old School plays Pat Smear).
Watch: “What We Do Is Secret” Trailer
(And damn, after all that writing, this thing looks awful)
Update 4.29.08: The old trailer went down, so we posted this one and from what we can recall, this seems like a much better, “professional” trailer
