Preview
END OF THE CENTURY: THE STORY OF THE RAMONES
Directed by Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia
Opens Friday, March 4
Uptown Screen
Considering that Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia were a couple of first-time filmmakers with barely any understanding of what they were getting themselves into, their idea of documenting the career of punk-rock legends The Ramones could have ended very badly. Of course, it also could have begun badly.
"We were afraid that someone might convince The Ramones that we were going to make a bad documentary," admits Gramaglia over the phone from his New York home. "That was one of our fears. But both Johnny and Joey... I mean, they knew me as a clerk in their accountant’s office. That’s what I was. I proposed the film to them and I described to Johnny and Joey in depth what it would look like, what life it would have, how it would evolve. Johnny understood it and was OK with it. He knew I had no experience, and he was OK with it."
That might have something to do with the tendency of the brothers to surround themselves with an extended family of associates.
"I remember when we went out to some of their gigs when they were still together. I walked backstage and (second drummer) Marky was there and… he shook my hand and said ‘Hey, John told me about this. It’s good to have one of the family doing it.’"
POSTHUMOUS PROFIT MOTIVE
At this point, fans of The Godfather might note that acceptance as family often counts for nothing, especially when the lawyers and managers step in. Joey’s management company, afraid the film was slighting their dead client for Johnny, demanded the filmmakers find more interview footage of Joey before approving the final cut. It was a power play that left Gramaglia and Fields scrambling at the last minute to meet their demands.
"That was the least of the problems," Gramaglia says, with a sigh. "The worst was Johnny’s manager, who used to manage the band and is even in the movie, Gary Kurfirst. He was just the worst. But we couldn’t really, y’know, talk about what was going on because we were still negotiating with them….
He made it impossible to get it out. I was the one negotiating, so I would say I spent most of my energy resisting the manager who wanted ways to skim off the film. The weird thing is that Johnny was very loyal and he trusted this guy, and he couldn’t see that he had other motives."
Gramaglia’s friendly relations with Joey and Johnny came back to haunt him. "I basically didn’t need the managers and they were offended by that. By the same token, if we’d gone through the managers, we never would have made this film, it never woulda been this kind of film. So, we did what we had to do, I guess, in the end."
Left in the hands of nervous personal managers, End of the Century would no doubt have been a very different film from the unsparingly bleak, blackly hilarious and sometimes painfully honest documentary that Gramaglia and Fields delivered.
A REAL HARD LOOK
"We’ve gotten a lot of criticism here in the States that it’s kinda too straightforward – unsentimental," he says with a laugh. "Well, I guess, dark is what they actually said – that we don’t celebrate the band. I think that’s wrong. I think that we do celebrate the band. This cut actually has more of the celebration without giving up a real look at the band, a real hard look at the band."
That includes band in-fighting, serious drug abuse, wrongheaded decisions and a revelation about the underlying cause of a rift between Johnny and Joey that led to them not speaking for 15 years, even while Joey lay on his deathbed in 2001. For Johnny, a control freak who tried hard to project a business-as-usual image of the band, End of the Century must have been unsettling, especially since it didn’t show him in the best light.
"I think he was a very courageous guy in the end," Gramaglia says regarding the guitarist, who passed away in September of last year. "I was very surprised. I knew him. I knew he could at times be ruthless, you know, and... we had been sort of screwed by the band, or abandoned by the band, let’s say, the first time around that we tried to make the movie in ’95. So Jim was always very wary that we were going to be screwed again.
"I dunno. I sort of had to believe that it wasn’t going to happen, although I feared at the back of my mind that it might. I mean, members of The Ramones like Tommy would say ‘You’ve gotta be very careful with John. You just have to just keep your eyes open.’"
JOHNNY KEEPS HIS WORD
Johnny stuck to his word; the filmmakers were allowed to make the film they wanted, warts and all. It not only features the bad blood between Johnny and Joey, but also the revolving cast of disgruntled drummers, the endless tours, and (also deceased) bassist Dee Dee’s strange dalliance with rap music. Johnny comes across as a tight-fisted right-winger, which by all accounts he was.
"When the film first came out, we showed it before Johnny saw it, which was a kind of strategic thing. At least if you could say that the audience loved the movie so much, well, John was also very pragmatic."
The filmmakers took a rough cut to Slamdance, the indie shadow of the Sundance Film Festival. There they rounded up people from the more respectable Sundance to view their work in progress. "It was a success. It sold out and had unprecedented extra screenings at the festival and John was OK with it at that point. But he argued heavily about aspects that were in the film, things he would try and get toned down or even removed. In the end he saw they were important to the film, and he liked the film, so he left them in, and I give him a lot of credit for that…. He doesn’t look good in the film and he left it in, because that was the vision we had. He always promised that he would let us make the film that we wanted to make, and he did that." |
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