Darby Crash: "Hi, I'm going to kill myself tonight"

"I started off the work on What We Do Is Secret with a thought about what it would mean to make the Darby Crash movie, and I was instantly blown away by what that would mean," says Grossman, in L.A. "It hit me as a very intensive, immersive, scary, long process, but important, because I really cared about that period intensely, and I wanted to do it justice. I knew I was embarking on a long journey, and I didn't know how it was going to end. I teamed up with some people from the era, started talking to them and interviewing them, taping and writing down anecdotes."

Grossman's process involved interviewing Penelope Spheeris, who invited him up to her place to watch some outtakes from her seminal punk-doc The Decline of Western Civilization, in which Crash was interviewed extensively.

"It was a long process until I started to boil [my interviews] down and fit them into that traditional movie structure," Grossman continues. "And it was kind of working, until one day I learned that Darby had a five-year plan to become famous and commit suicide. That gave it a certain thrust that made sense, and I had this idea that I wanted it to be a new kind of musical film, in that Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers sense of movies. I'm a big fan of those [kinds of movies], but no one really takes that form and modernizes it anymore. My idea is: Here's a band, they're performing; eight, 10 pieces can perform the same function as a narrative arc."

Through a feel-good, grand-scale set piece of musical theatre on film about a heroin-shootin', sweaty sleazy punk band, Grossman has indeed made a film that thrums with vanity, insanity and joie de vivre. But still, he attributes the gripping nature of What We Do Is Secret, at least in part, to the most sober aspect of the filmmaking process: research.

"A lot of memories are foggy for one reason or another, and for some people it was too painful for them to remember what really went down, or they didn't want to believe what went down, or didn't believe it was a suicide, and they had the note, and then we could never find the note. What was more important is that it seems that for the days leading up to [Crash's death], he would go up to people and say 'Hi, I'm going to kill myself tonight.' When he actually did commit suicide, finally he did it. Which doesn't lessen the effect of what he did, but it helps to know him."

What We Do Is Secret
Premieres at Fantasia on July 6
in the presence of Rodger Grossman
www.fantasiafest.com
 
 

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Ø     If you're in a line-up at Fantasia long enough you'll hear the inevitable grumbling--no, not about the waiting but the strange direction that Fantasia's programming has taken in recent years. One supposes that in the presence of other filmfests in town *NOT* doing their job right (yes, Serge Losique that's directed squarely at you...) Fantasia's programmers have increased the number of docs screened during the fest's run but for Fantasia regular attendees like myself this change is not entirely welcome. We're genre fans, if we wanted to see docs we'd attend doc festivals. Yes, some of the docs screened this year and last were primo but others were plain out of place. What We Do Is Secret falls in that category. I saw it, I enjoyed it but I kept asking myself the same question throughout the screening--what could they be screening here instead of this? When you go to a steakhouse do you want to see sushi on the menu? Both are valid choices but seeing them on the same page makes very little sense, don't you think?
Pedro Eggers		July 10th, 2008

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