#Ladies & Gentlemen The Fabulous Stains

[marypickfords]

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler, 1982)

[vertigoartgore]

Promotional still of the "skunks" from the 1982 movie Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. Featuring the (then) very young Diane Lane, Laura Dern and Ray Winstone as punk rockers.

[dearly]

Laura Dern in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982)

[steampunkforever]

In film the concept of "style over substance" is a tricky one, because this is in a visual medium where leaning wholly into "style" is artistically viable, and often encouraged.

Famed director Wes Anderson gets pinged for being "style over substance" for this very reason. The entire "brand" he commands is hyperstylization, and the substance of the characters, plots, and his films often use the more two-dimensional character work to hyperstylize further. This contributes to basically any center-framed pastel filter shot on instagram getting marked "Wes Anderson Aesthetic," but analysis of the philosophy and deployment of Anderson's visuals clearly demarcates a line between "style over substance" and "style *becoming* substance." Which is to say that the style/substance argument is still viable when applied to Anderson, but is not in fact the silver bullet for categorizing every film he's made since the Life Aquatic.

In contrast, the film Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains is a more concrete, if nuanced example of true "style over substance," but this time thanks to studio meddling, not due to the single-minded pursuits of a twee auteur.

The movie itself is solid. Performances from very young Diane Lane and Laura Dern are spot on, visually the film looks great (minus some unconvincing cinematic rain), and its message of girl power is tempered in its saccharine messaging by the nuance of Diane Lane's character arc. Art at least the nuance of her arc right up until the end, which was ruined by the studio.

The Fabulous Stains are a girl group led by Diane Lane's Corrine "3rd Degree" Burns, a 15-ish year old girl made famous by quitting her job as a fast food worker on national television, now leading young punk girl group to fame and infamy. She's immensely unlikable in an interesting way that I appreciate, and balances the fact that 15 year old girls suck with a performance that eschews the annoying child actor trope. It's well written and well delivered, and tells a tale of the rise and fall of punk rock. The ending just renders it hollow.

This is a film about ego and making it. The start of the movie has the Stains opening for a washed up glam metal band whose bassist, the only member of the group with true talent, overdoses in the ladies toilet. This is the way of the rocker. You will hit the height of your fame one day. It's all downhill from there until you finally meet your demise. A sellout. Uncool. Old. The rocker's death gives the Stains their big break but also foretells Corrine's demise. All those cigarettes will catch up to her one day. And at the end of the movie The Stains must pay the piper.

Except they don't. You have the studio to thank for this. They wanted a happy ending, and threw out an engaging evil woman narrative for-- I kid you not-- an MTV music video. The struggle for fame, fortune, and artistic ethics is wiped away in favor of a message that boils down to "if you fail to keep your artistic integrity in the face of success you can always sell out." Which feels much emptier than what the first half of the film was setting us up for. With the substance gutted the film becomes solely style.

That said, it's a much better girl band film than Josie and the Pussycats or that one Jem and the Holograms movie with Hayley Kiyoko. Plus the sanitized ending gave us the inspiration for that one Ex Hex music video. Despite what it could have been, it's a solid film for some casual viewing.

[schlock-luster-video]

On September 16, 2008, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains was released on DVD in the United States.

[nadiea]

ladies and gentlemen, the fabulous stains (1982)

[verminprincess]

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[demonspeeding666]

Ladies and gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982)

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[marypickfords]

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler, 1982)

[iamtheweirdomister]

Ladies and Gentleman, the Fabulous Stains: teenage Diane Lane and Laura Dern rock punk

This long-buried gem from 1982 about a teen-girl punk band subverts the great rock’n’roll swindle of the Sex Pistols

Jenny Valentish Mon 18 Jan 2021 11.30 EST

When Johnny Rotten crouched on the edge of the stage in San Francisco in 1978, at the demise of the Sex Pistols’ US tour, and asked, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” it would inspire a key moment in a film four years later.

In Ladies and Gentleman, the Fabulous Stains, Billy (Ray Winstone) fronts the Looters – a London punk band, all “poxy” this and “bollocks” that – rounded out by real-life Sex Pistols Paul Cook and Steve Jones, as well as Paul Simonon from the Clash. Billy addresses the fanatical teenage girl audience awaiting the set of headline act the Fabulous Stains, and snarls: “You’ve been ripped off.”

Rotten’s comment had been in reference to manager Malcolm McLaren booking the disastrous tour in cities unlikely to embrace the Pistols, whereas Billy’s broadside is motivated by resentment that his booking agent has turned what had been the Looters’ support band, the Fabulous Stains, into a cynical marketing concept.

(Stains trailer here: https://youtu.be/06kCwPpyjCk)

“You’re adverts. You’re a commercial,” he spits at the audience of “skunks”, named after the two-tone hair of the Fabulous Stains. This sea of teenage girls is dressed in the official Stains merch of transparent red blouses, completed by red winged eye makeup, and underwear and fishnets with no skirts.

It’s not the only parallel to the Pistols in this long-lost cult film, now available to rent or buy on YouTube. Jones and Cook, who wrote many songs on the soundtrack, formed the Professionals after the Pistols broke up. One of that band’s singles, Join the Professionals, winds up being the Fabulous Stains’ break-out MTV hit.

Trailer for Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains.

The Fabulous Stains themselves, made up of nihilistic firecracker Corinne Burns (a 15-year-old Diane Lane); Jessica McNeil (13-year-old Laura Dern) and Tracy Burns (Marianne Kanter) are pitched somewhere between the Go-Gos and the Runaways, and frontwoman Corinne is frequently invited on to TV shows, thanks to her bleak one-liners that are guaranteed to shock suburbia. One moralistic TV news anchor is clearly modelled on Bill Grundy, whose 1976 interview with the Pistols descended into mayhem when he contemptuously goaded them into swearing.

The plot follows a tour of the US, initially headlined by rock dinosaurs the Metal Corpses (a washed-up version of KISS), followed on the bill by the Looters and the Fabulous Stains.

The Fabulous Stains are just as disparaging of Metal Corpses (“He was an old man in a young girl’s world,” they tell reporters when the guitarist overdoses backstage), but also of the Looters, who are themselves has-beens by 1982. They’re repulsed by the way their tourmates assume all women are groupies, giving rise to the slogan, “We’re the Stains and we don’t put out”. Their star soon eclipses that of the other bands, and Corinne becomes some kind of monster herself.

In fact, one wonders what the famously prickly Dowd made of the end result of Ladies and Gentleman, the Fabulous Stains. She and director/record executive Lou Adler apparently couldn’t agree on the ending, and she walked off set after being groped by a crew member. Her feminist script rubbed up awkwardly against the lingering shots of pubescent breasts bouncing behind transparent blouses.

Paramount buried the film, perhaps because of a poorly received test screening, and it languished in the vaults for decades, only being screened at the odd film festival. Those fleeting outings were enough to fire the imaginations of Courtney Love and riot grrrl bands such as Bikini Kill, but the film didn’t reach a wider audience until it was released on DVD in 2008 with a cast commentary.

There are some great visual moments, such as the audience of teenage Stains clones flipping off the Looters en masse, and the dilapidated tour bus rumbling through shit towns (driven by real-life reggae artist Barry Ford as the tour manager) painted red, gold and green, with “The Looters” spray-painted over “The Metal Corpses”. And the smart-mouthed script isn’t as contrived as you might anticipate, despite having to jump a number of sharks in order to catapult the Stains to MTV stardom.

The ultimate burn comes from Corinne Burns, of course.

“You are so jealous of me,” she tells Billy, who’s kicked down her dressing room door to tell her she knows nothing about the industry. “I’m everything you ever wanted to be.”

“A cunt,” he spits.

“Exactly.”

 Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains is available to stream on YouTube

[dearly]

DIANE LANE in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982)

[fabulousxstains]

Admin reveal

[schlock-luster-video]

On July 3, 2009 Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains was screened on TCM Underground. Marking the occasion with some original Diane Lane art!

[nadiea]

ladies and gentlemen, the fabulous stains (1982) dir. lou adler