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Scary Monsters, Super Freaks
by Stephen Dalton (additional reporting by Bob McCabe)
from Uncut, 1998

Velvet Goldmine, US cult director Todd Haynes' fantastic take on the Seventies Glam era, is set to be one of the most controversial films of the year. In this Uncut special, Stephen Dalton traces its troubled history and we talk to its star, Ewan McGregor, producer Michael Stipe, and Haynes, while Chris Roberts charts the spectacular rise and fall of Glam Rock and its major icons.

The freaks are out in force tonight. Squeezed into lurid outfits, hair dyed every artificial hue imaginable, braying and squealing and jostling for position. These are the Cannes paparazzi, thronged by that scary breed of hardcore fan who will crowd outside a remote French mansion at two in the morning on the slender promise of seeing Ewan McGregor glide past in an armoured personnel carrier. The Mark Chapman massive in full effect, mainlining on the hysteria that only the most spectacularly hyped movie at the world's most glamorous film festival can generate. Professional stalkers. Scary monsters. Super creeps.

The Velvet Goldmine party on the last Friday of Cannes 1998 is the fortnight's most exclusive bash. It takes place in a palatial, marble-floored villa high above a widescreen Mediterranean vista. The rooms are decked out in crushed velvet, the French serving staff in stack heels and garish Glam gear. Journalists are banned, but megastar rockers and Hollywood talents have jetted in from all over the globe. Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Bono and a raddled looking Bryan Ferry are shuttled by limousine through the military-strength security cordon, past the seething crowds, then decanted onto a red carpet stretching right from the gates to the front door.
Inside, they join the film's cast, crew and an ultra-select guest list of around 300 others in a surreal timewarp of Roman revelry and Seventies decadence. In silver nail varnish and facial glitter, Michael Stipe holds court in the garden while Eddie Izzard shows off his rather fetching frock. The DJ duo, the Heavenly Birds, specially imported from London clubland, are on strict instructions to play mostly Glam tunes, but movie business schmoozers keep asking them to turn the volume down. Donna Matthews from Elastica leads some friends onto the dancefloor, but serious party action is not on the cards. With champagne on limitless tap all night, the mood is understandably relaxed.

Todd Haynes surveys this retro revivalist orgy and privately worries whether his film is heading for triumph or turkey status. In this air-kissing celebrity netherworld, of course, Velvet Goldmine is an unqualified masterpiece. But word from the Cannes screenings has been mixed, to say the least. The press conference was full of bafflement and veiled criticism. Some reviewers have already drawn parallels with Absolute Beginners, that nadir of vacuous Eighties style-whore cinema. All the young dudes carry the news, but the news is not always good.
Velvet Goldmine gives a sexy Citizen Kane remix to the early Seventies career of Bowie-esque rocker Brian Slade. In his Glam Rock prime, Bowie was a polysexual peacock and inspiration to suburban escapists everywhere. Shedding identies and shamelessly stealing those of others, Bowie was the most heroically ambitious, subversive, progressive, audaciously intelligent and life-affirmingly ridiculous rock icon ever constructed. He was a penis in furs, and he dared to dream.

Writer/director Haynes weaves a kaleidoscopic fantasia of wiggy starlust from the rich mythology of Glam Rock. David Bowie, Angie Bowie, Iggy Pop, Marc Bolan and Brian Eno are all here, half-concealed behind flimsy disguises. It's the past as fantasy, an ultra-camp alternative history dressed in Biba and photographed by Helmut Newton. A big lie, in other words, but a lie that tells the truth. The very definition of camp.
David Bowie acted and sang in Absolute Beginners, of course, but has publicly snubbed Velvet Goldmine. While William Randolph Hearst used his publishing empire to attack Citizen Kane, Bowie simply declined to let his music be used in the movie named after one of his songs and inspired by his life. In Cannes to promote his latest film role alongside Goldie in the gay gangster drama, Everybody Loves Sunshine, Bowie is rumoured to be heading for the party. He never arrives.

Although no stranger to scandal and critical revulsion in the past, Haynes wonders, and not for the first time, whether he might just have bitten off more than he can chew on this occasion.

Rewind three years to May, 1995, and Todd Haynes is at an earlier Cannes festival, on this occasion promoting Safe, his eerily open-ended fable about an LA housewife who becomes allergic to modern life. But his mind is already fiercely focused on the Glam Rock project he has been dreaming into life with his producer and former college mate, Christine Vachon, for at least five years. One sideways glance at Haynes betrays his current obsession: he sports electric orange Ziggy hair, stack heels and skinny-rib glitter top. Oh, you pretty things.
Haynes is reading Richard Ellman's stupendous biography of Oscar Wilde, finding parallels with Glam's gleefully artificial world of bisexual dandyism and constructed identities. As with all his projects, he is compiling scrapbooks of reference images which will eventually inform the film's highly stylised look. He is also studying the movies which fuelled his teenage dreams, from Performance to A Clockwork Orange, soaking up their trippy visuals and sinister glamour.

But his tuned into contemporary pop currents too: 1995 is the high water mark of Britpop, with bands like Suede, Pulp and Blur drawing heavily on the polysexual art-school posturing of early Bowie and Roxy Music. The fop is back in pop, while Bowie and Eno have reunited for the first time in 15 years for their neo-Glam album project, Outside. Meanwhile, an obscure young actor named Ewan McGregor is in the midst of shooting a hugely stylised, low-budget rock'n'roll movie which will blast Britpop fashion back onto the global map. It's called Trainspotting.

Later, at the 1996 Sundance festival, Haynes and Vachon run into Michael Stipe. The R.E.M. singer has just founded a Hollywood production company, Single Cell, to complement his more experimental, New York-based "low-budget guerilla operation," C-100 Film Corp. He loves Safe and is keen to work with Haynes. Stipe becomes executive producer on the Glam project, now christened Velvet Goldmine. He is particularly useful in persuading pop stars to not just allow their music to be used, but also to appear in the movie.

With British co-producer Scott Meek and casting director Suzie Figgis on board, Velvet Goldmine begins tentative pre-production throughout 1996. Figgis scours London clubland for freaks, performance artists and pop stars to fill cameos and small roles. Donna Matthews and Placebo singer Brian Molko agree to portray minor Glam figures loosely inspired by Suzi Quatro and Marc Bolan.

Irish unknown Jonathan Rhys Meyers is cast as Brian Slade, the drama's Bowie-esque protagonist, with Ewan McGregor playing his Iggy Pop-derived lover, Curt Wild. In the preface to his Velvet Goldmine screenplay, published this month by Faber, Haynes describes this allegorical affair as "a love story between New York and London, between contrasting traditions in music and style."

The wordless role of Jack Fairy, an Eno/Ferry amalgam who opens the film by assassinating Slade on stage, is offered to Jarvis Cocker. Sadly, the Pulp singer is deep in post-fame comedown and the role passes to Micko Westmoreland, alias cultish electronic recording star, The Bowling Green.

Late in 1996, McGregor and Rhys Meyers meet for the first time in London. Having grown out his cockatoo crop, Haynes now sports a natty Steve Marriott feathercut. It is a freezing day, and McGregor has his jacket hood over his ears. He pulls it down to reveal his new hairstyle: an identical feathercut, as seen in A Life Less Ordinary.
"God, you guys are twins!" laughs Rhys Meyers. "It looked so much better on him," sighs Haynes afterwards. "But I want to make it clear he has admitted where he got the haircut from." Hair becomes a running joke as the film gears up. Eddie Izzard, cast by Figgis to play Slade's svengali manager, Jerry Devine, will also model a Haynes feathercut for his role.

In these early stages, morale in the Velvet Goldmine camp is upbeat. London is supposedly swinging again, and feverish gossip about this glamorous movie buzzes around the fashionable bars of Camden and Soho. Everybody loves dressing up, after all, and on paper the movie already sounds like a rock'n'roll cult classic in the tradition of Privilege, Slade in Flame and Trainspotting.
Alas, the party atmosphere is about to turn very sour indeed.

With filming scheduled for early 1997, two mighty spanners are tossed into the Velvet Goldmine machinery. David Bowie, whose life and work form the backbone of the movie's plot, refuses permission for six of his songs to be used on the soundtrack after lengthy deliberation. More seriously, the film's main financiers, CiBy 2000 (a French pun on Cecil B. DeMille), suddenly fold, forcing Haynes and Vachon to shave a least a million dollars from their budget and several weeks from an already tight shooting schedule.

The official line on the Bowie dilemma is that the veteran rocker politely declined to co-operate because he intends to use these songs for his own Ziggy Stardust revival project. Haynes is similarly diplomatic, painting the loss as a healthy creative challenge rather than a crisis.

"David has been only professional about the entire thing, and he actually put a great deal of time and thought into his decision not to give us the music," the director reflects. "I was told he read the script three times and saw all my films, and he talked to people about it. He's a smart man. And although at the time, of course, I was really disappointed, I think the film actually benefits from it not being Bowie music. Because if there is ever a chance to read the Brian Slade character a little bit more fluidly, having him sing Bowie songs would have sealed that off completely."

In the screenplay preface, Haynes strikes a sadder note over the superstar snub: "I really hope Bowie can see in the film the affection and respect I have for him."

Meanwhile, Michael Stipe and the movie's musical director, Randy Poster, go into overdrive, obtaining the rights to obscure Glam tunes and commissioning new ones from the likes of Pulp and Shudder To Think. Stipe faxes Iggy Pop, more out of courtesy than necessity, since the Iggy numbers in Velvet Goldmine have already been secured, along with a guest appearance by ex-Stooge Ron Asheton. Pop phones Haynes and gives his blessing, largely on the strength of Safe. "He didn't just say he liked Safe, he said it was his favourite film ever," Stipe recalls.

The R.E.M. singer also manages to swing a fruitful meeting between one-time adversaries Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno, the architects of art-school Glam in Roxy Music's early-Seventies heyday. Stipe even relaxes his self-imposed boundaries as executive producer by penning some songs himself, period pastiche collaborations with Grant Lee Buffalo. Not all of this music will make the final score, but at least the Bowie-sized gap has been filled.

The missing budget is harder to replace. Stipe takes meetings in Hollywood to try and raise extra funds, but filming still begins in straitened circumstances with a new financial ceiling of seven million dollars. Rehearsal time is slashed to almost nothing. The streets of New York and Berlin are recreated in London, not entirely convincingly. Many cast and crew members are unhappy. Ewan McGregor becomes fed up with playing Curt Wild, partly because he is forbidden to drink beer in case it bloats his Iggy-esque physique.

Haynes later admits this was a "miserable" shoot, calling Velvet Goldmine "the hardest film I've ever been involved with. We didn't have a lot of money, so it was a bit of a scramble. And I knew just from the script alone it would be a hugely demanding film on me, because of the number of components, the amount of musical numbers that had to be fully produced before shooting began, and just dealing with so much music. It's also a very ornate little jigsaw puzzle where things had to work together even though they were shot in so many different places."
In April, 1997, one of those jigsaw pieces is being filmed in a carefully guarded shoot at south London's largest rock venue, the Brixton Academy. A silver-maned McGregor is onstage, belting out Iggy's "TV Eye" and "Gimme Danger," dropping his silver vinyl trousers and waving his dick at 400 glammed-up extras. A self-confessed wannabe rock star, Ewan supplies his own gravelly vocals with undeniable aplomb.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers is also adding his singing voice on the soundtrack, though some of his Brian Slade vocals will be dubbed by the celestial tonsils of Radiohead's Thom Yorke. The 20-year-old Irishman is far less convinced of his cock-rock abilities than McGregor seems to be.

"It's hard to perform in front of other people, especially girls," frowns the chain-smoking novice, incongruously dressed in peacock clobber as he huddles in his trailer on a Brixton car park. "Everybody's saying to me, 'You've got a new costume and a new character, you can do it grand.' But no, fuck it, I'm still feeling like myself. Just because I put on a costume and make-up and stuff like that, I particularly don't feel like another character when I put them on." Previously known for small roles in films such as Michael Collins and B Monkey, Rhys Meyers approached the Glam elements of Velvet Goldmine at an unusual angle.

"I was born in 1977, I have no recollection of the Seventies," he says loftily. "What I do have is a recollection of the Nineties and what I saw in the script from the Seventies is what I saw in the Nineties. It's about freshness. The Seventies was a liberal time, but the Nineties is also a liberal time. I didn't listen to any Seventies music because I felt so arrogant about my character. I didn't want to sit down and listen to all these performers and in the end feel really inadequate, because I'm meant to pioneer Glam Rock. I'm meant to be the first."
A fortnight later, shooting shifts to the tiny Bray Studios near Windsor. To mark his last day of filming, McGregor allows himself a celebratory lunchtime pint. He is clearly relieved to be leaving such a strained production. The rest of the cast, however, still have several weeks to go.

Eddie Izzard puts a brave face on proceedings, as well he might. This is the cross-dressing comic's biggest movie break yet after years of thwarted ambition and lukewarm auditions. Before Velvet Goldmine is even released, he will sign a prestigious deal with the heavyweight Hollywood talent agency, William Morris. Also, the irony of a celebrated transvestite playing virtually the only straight man in a drama brimming with bisexuals is not lost on Izzard, though he still gets to model some deliriously camp outfits.

"I look like a general who's taken over Bolivia in a military coup," he quips of his garish pseudo-military garb.
"Normally, I'm just in sharp suits that are so loud they shout."

Izzard was once a pop manager himself, working with indie hopefuls The Wasp Factory, but he was never a big-league schemer like his character, Jerry Devine.

"He's very driven, very calculating," the stand-up surrealist explains. "His whole idea, his whole ethos is to start behaving like a star now. You are a star now, so let's just see the public catch onto the fact that this is what's happening. I think there are a number of managers and agents who have this ethos, but I've not modelled him on anyone in particular. Certain characters in the film are based on real people, but I don't know how based they are legal-wise."

After the nine-week Velvet Goldmine shoot wraps, this nebulous distinction becomes the post-production party line. All the film's characters are fictions, we are told, not brazen impersonations of Bowie and Iggy at all. Ooh, no. This disingenuous dance around the truth will baffle many viewers when Velvet Goldmine is finally screened to Cannes and London critics a whole year later, in the spring of 1998. If the film is fantasy, why stick so closely to biographical detail? And if it's a biopic, why tamper so recklessly with known facts? Some older reviewers take these liberties very personally indeed: they remember Glam Rock, and it was nowhere near as gay or as garish as Haynes paints it. How dare this American upstart hijack our pop culture heritage and remake it in his own image! Clap him in irons and throw him in the Tower!

To make matters worse, Britpop is in its dying throes and Tony Blair's Cool Britannia scam has dissolved into hot air. The new wave of art-school artifice is in retreat, with just a few middling chancers like Placebo ploughing a rather lumpen, neo-Glam path.

The future doesn't look too promising for the Citizen Kane of rock movies.

Fast forward to today. Todd Haynes is back in London, fighting his corner like a pro. Advance word on Velvet Goldmine is lukewarm, but Haynes has a ready riposte for every potential sleight. Remember this is the writer/director whose 1987 debut Superstar - The Karen Carpenter Story, filmed on a shoestring budget using Barbie Doll actors, was forced underground by a cease-and-desist order from Richard Carpenter and A&M Records.

Remember also, this is the AIDS activist and former figurehead of New Queer Cinema whose harrowing 1991 triptych, Poison, was reviled by every scumbag, right-wing politician in America for using its public grant-aided budget to show explicit scenes of prison rape and gay sex. Rather than retreat behind liberal platitudes about free speech, Haynes went on national TV and forced his sexuality down the throat of these bigoted political opportunists. Metaphorically speaking, of course. This is one artist who knows how to tackle criticism head on.
"It's funny now, because all the senators I debated with on talk shows are now really well known," Haynes laughs. "I helped them on their way. I remember them when they were just lowly fag-bashers! Hahaha!"
So how does the director answer charges that Velvet Goldmine is a shambolic visual riddle of half-formed characters and unexplained dead ends?

"Given what the film is really trying to do, that doesn't surprise me at all," he shrugs. "The film is an out-right attack on a lot of unexamined assumptions about what films are supposed to be, like the notion of 'getting to know' a character in some psychological way. It's an attack on the things that people hold more dear about film, which is that it's 'real'. That was always my target, which I think is what Glam Rock's target was -- that's why I adopted that position. The idea of doing a gritty naturalistic film about Glam Rock is absurd, just as doing a film about Fifties American R&B in this style would be absurd."

So it's not a film about Glam Rock, it's film as Glam Rock? This movie is your very own concept album?
"Yeah. My challenge to myself was to try and apply a lot of the language that I identified in my favourite Glam Rock music to a narrative context, which basically meant doing away with a naturalistic approach and elevating this notion of fiction and artifice. There's no psychological explanation for any of these characters, it wasn't what I was interested in. So I relied on the actors' abilities to fill them out."

This is a great catch-all excuse for at least some of the movie's flaws. The Eighties scenes set in Manhattan but clearly filmed near Waterloo station, for instance, can now be justified as representing the "fictional" Eighties of Glam's bleak futurist vision. Piece of piss!

"The film is not about the real Eighties at all, it's about the future as seen from the Seventies," insists Haynes. "Bowie's Diamond Dogs is about this very Orwellian, conservative and repressive future and that has obvious resonances for what would later occur both in the States and in Britain."
 
In other words, there are smart intellectual arguments at work here beneath all the foundation and mascara. For all its shortcomings, Velvet Goldmine is an art movie in high-rise glitter boots.

"All that means is that the film falls much more in line with the way most of my films have been received than people might have expected, but to me it's not a big surprise," nods Haynes. "All I want is, I want kids to go see it, kids who don't even know what an art movie is. Because the films I loved as a kid, you don't get to see much like them any more, like Performance and 2001... and A Clockwork Orange. Maybe today we call them art films, but then they were called 'experience' movies, they were like taking a drug trip. That's what I would love to happen with this film, regardless of the critical divide."

More than an homage to Glam, Velvet Goldmine feels like a celebration of the first era in rock'n'roll history when it actually became cool for ordinary kids to experiment with their sexuality. Haynes agrees this was deliberate.

"A lot of the Seventies revivalism we've seen has focused on the most disposable, silly, bubblegum aspects of Seventies culture, from The Brady Bunch to disco, and I really wanted to talk about something very different. The Seventies couldn't have happened without that hyper-politicised awareness of the late-Sixties and, in a way, people had to turn against the previous peace-and-love generation. There was this really naive, perhaps, but optimistic integrationist spirit going on. I can't think of a time that was quite as courageous and curious as that in breaking down the boundaries between male and female, gay and straight -- all of that."

So, your movie is a coded message imploring kids all over the world to turn bisexual immediately?

"I would love to see that happen, absolutely! We have a very modest goal for this film, and that's just to turn every gay person straight and every straight person gay," beams Haynes winningly.

"But even beyond the sexual agenda, what's so brilliant about Glam Rock to me is that it extends to identity itself. The idea of dressing up, putting on a wig and eye shadow -- to me, that's not a reduction, that actually makes identity a creative act. For kids to have a rock icon stand up and say 'Changes' is what it's all about -- that's what kids experience at that age! That's what their life is! Everyone else is telling them to turn into something stable and consistent and organised, and this Ziggy character tells them completely the opposite! That's a radical opening!"

Did you never feel you were taking too many liberties by mirroring Bowie's life so intimately, fabricating affairs he probably never had?

"Bowie was flirting with the constructed persona of Ziggy Stardust in ways which toppled over into his real life, so I felt what I had as raw material was already fictionalised," argues Haynes. "That was the spirit of it: I was just fictionalising the fictions, taking them further.

"My feeling is you never know what anybody does in bed, behind closed doors. You know two people are married, but you don't ever know if they even fuck! You only know the stuff they do publicly. So, if they're choosing to have pictures of Bowie and Lou Reed snogging at parties published and distributed, that's not necessarily true, but it's real. It exists in the imagination of the people who see it."

Isn't it just possible that Bowie refused to allow the use of his music because you paint the Ziggy character as a shallow plagiarist who later turns into a conformist, corporate whore?

"If that's true, he's obviously not reading his own quotes from the time, when he defined himself brilliantly as a human Xerox machine," says Haynes. "All artists draw from the culture around them, he just admitted it in a really brazen way that was brilliant and strong and bold. I think that is genius, not derivative and weak. And also, if Bowie's sensitive about the Eighties scenes, he's also someone who talks disparagingly about his Serious Moonlight phase today. He, himself, is least interested in his most commercially successful period, so again he beats everybody to his own self-criticism."

Has Iggy Pop responded to the movie?

"He hasn't yet seen it. We contacted each other before, because I wanted him to hear it from me, and I described the character that he inspired to a large degree. He called me up and was just so incredibly cool, he just wanted to give the film his blessing, he didn't want to know anything more about it than what I'd already said. He's amazing, such a sweet-hearted guy. I think he's gonna dig it, actually."

Did you pre-warn him about the implied affair between his character and the Bowie figure?

"Not explicitly, but I said if he wanted to read the script, he could. He's probably heard already, but you know Iggy's famous line about all men being gay? Hahaha! He seems like a pretty secure guy."
Ewan McGregor does a great Iggy impression, right down to the trouser furniture. Did he have any qualms about getting his tackle out?

"No, that wasn't a problem at all -- he's just so enthusiastic. And what he really looks like to a lot of people is Kurt Cobain. He physically resembles Kurt probably more than he does Iggy. And, of course, Kurt dyed his hair silver because of Iggy, so it's all one big cycle. I don't mind that because it does break up the pure Iggy connotations, which are more there physically than in the character."

Like all great pop movements, from mod to punk and beyond, Glam Rock kicked down the walls between pure prosaic suburban reality and Utopian teenage fantasy. It allowed dreams to seem real, if only for a fleeting moment. Velvet Goldmine takes place on the far side of this divide, in that brightly lit Neverland of eternal possibility which lies behind all the best pop music, always just teasingly out of reach. Criticising this film for failing to capture Glam's documentary truth is like slagging The Wizard of Oz for misrepresenting Kansas.

Not that Velvet Goldmine is flawless by any standards. It is muddled, unresolved, obscure and annoying in equal measures. But it is also heroically ambitious, subversive, progressive, audaciously intelligent and life-affirmingly ridiculous. It dares to dream.

Todd Haynes argues that Glam Rock died out in Britain, and failed to conquer America, because it was "too referential, too witty, too ironic." The same fate, we fear, probably awaits this bold experiment in pop-art cinema. If that sounds like intellectual elitism, fuck you. That's precisely the defeatist attitude which stifles visionary film-makers and encourages moronic blockbusters. Goodbye Performance and A Clockwork Orange, hello Godzilla and Armageddon.

Some will be disappointed by Velvet Goldmine. The fact that its release has been postponed twice and its running time amended since Cannes suggests that the film-makers are somewhat anxious, too. Is Haynes himself disappointed with the finished film?

"Not any more. It's always different from how you picture it, and part of the process of making a film is, you have to allow for that. And also you have to listen to what the actors bring to it and yield there as well. But no, I'm really happy with it, I really feel like it is the film I intended to make, even if there are small things I would have liked to be subtly different."
Having finally exorcised his decade-long obsession, does Haynes have any future projects in the pipeline?

"I don't have a film in mind. I'm taking a break. I've ignored my life for too long. I need to get recharged."

Keep dreaming.

- end -