Brian Jonestown Massacre News

Fahrenheit 9/11 may have been the movie that everyone was gabbing about this past weekend, but another documentary was the talk of the Los Angeles Film Festival. Dig!, which chronicles the strained friendship and eventual rivalry between the Dandy Warhols and their equally talented but far less successful associates in the Brian Jonestown Massacre, made its L.A. debut at the Directors Guild Of America on Friday, June 25, after winning the Sundance Film Festival's esteemed Grand Jury Prize in January 2004. The screening, which was preceded on Thursday night by a release party featuring an acoustic performance by the Dandys' Courtney Taylor and Brent DeBoer, was the movie's last before its nationwide theatrical release on October 1.

Culled from 1,500 hours of raw footage shot between 1995 and 2002 by director Ondi Timoner, her brother David, and cinematographer/co-producer Vasco Lucas Nunes, and narrated by Courtney Taylor (who in the film describes his relationship with Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe as his "greatest inspiration, and ultimately, greatest regret"), Dig! is a fascinating, alternately comic and tragic glimpse at the crapshoot that is the music business. Members of the inexplicably self-sabotaging Brian Jonestown Massacre are shown living in dazed-and-confused, drug-den squalor and suffering through lineup changes, aborted record deals, narcotics busts, bloody onstage club brawls, disastrous tours, and (most of all) the tyranny of Newcombe, their brilliant but psychotic leader...while their peers the Dandy Warhols, signed to major label Capitol Records, make six-figure-budget music videos, play to hundreds of thousands at rock festivals, and cruise around France in a comfortably appointed tour bus. This inequity leads to a feud that begins as a lighthearted Blur-versus-Oasis-style stunt to generate publicity for the Massacre's TVT Records debut album, but turns dark and bitter when Newcombe begins terrorizing the Dandys. In one of the film's most gut-bustingly funny vignettes, he storms the Dandy Warhols' CMJ Convention showcase on rollerskates, passing out vinyl copies of his anti-Dandys parody single, "Not If You Were The Last Dandy On Earth"; in a much more disturbing scene, he mails them a package filled with bullet shells marked with the Dandys' individual names.

"The saddest thing was seeing [Newcombe's] self-destruction every time [the Brian Jonestown Massacre] had a chance for success," commented director Timoner after the screening, during a Q&A session that was also attended by the Dandy Warhols' Zia McCabe and Peter Holmstrom and former core Brian Jonestown Massacre members Joel Gion and Matt Hollywood. Hollywood, whose stormy final BJM gig is captured for all posterity in Dig!, stressed that not all of his experiences with the band were negative. "The good thing that came out of it was some of the most amazing music I ever heard," he told the audience. "I wouldn't take anything back." A rather jovial Holmstrom even went so far as to declare his willingness to tour again with the Brian Jonestown Massacre, saying, "I'd do it in a minute--it'd be fun!" (Holmstrom's pregnant bandmate McCabe, however, disagreed: "It doesn't seem worth it. It'd be too much of a risk.")

Conspicuously absent from the screening and Q&A was Anton Newcombe, who according to his website, www.brianjonestownmassacre.com, objects to the "Jerry Springer-esque" tone of the film; Timoner, however, quipped during the Q&A, "I think Anton's secretly enjoying this." Also missing at the screening was Courtney Taylor, although he seemed in favor of Dig! during his performance of Brian Jonestown Massacre songs at the party the night before, where he proudly announced, "I think this movie is about probably the greatest songwriter of this generation [Newcombe]. These are the songs that were most important to me in the last 10 years of my life."

Along with the final edited version of Dig! that hits theaters this fall, a double-DVD (which may or may not include a five-hour director's cut, and will include band commentary but may or may not include Newcombe's participation) will be released in summer 2005.