Welcome to the 7 Levels - I am your host Jordan Smith…your poet Virgil on this journey into the underworld of publicly available streaming movies. Joining us this week are Tim, Casey, Bekah, Andrew and Lisa .
The name Julien Temple is renowned as a pioneer in music video history. The biggest acts in the business trusted his vision to translate their material to an entirely new generation of adherents.
Not just listeners - viewers.
David Bowie turned to Temple frequently for highly stylized performance pieces.
Culture Club asked him to capture the timeless “otherness” the rest of the world has always found a little challenging (heads up for the jury in full vaudeville blackface - yikes)
Kevin Rowland and Dexy’s Midnight Runners asked Temple to showcase their new, rougher aesthetic as they searched for and found a hit single.
“Diamond life, lover boy. He move in space with minimum waste and maximum joy.”
Riding high, Temple took this meteoric success in an embryonic medium and immediately translated it into feature film opportunities that nearly destroyed the English film industry as a whole and absolutely wiped out Goldcrest Studios.
Of course, this was not entirely at the feet of one guy. In 1985, three separate movies (The Mission, Revolution, and Absolute Beginners) performed disastrously for various reasons across all markets nationally and internationally. Temple was only at the helm for Absolute Beginners, but that film lacked identifiable American stars like DeNiro and Pacino respectively to undercut the risk for the production crews - though everyone involved suffered mightily.
Writer Ed Power succinctly lays out the situation in an Independent retrospective on Revolution:
Once all three films had flopped commercially (only The Mission found initial critical success) the oncoming total nadir of English film production bought Temple an exile’s ticket from working in the country where he was born.
Enter…The Blonde Redhead
Julie Brown had a particularly Californian rise in the late seventies and early eighties. At once on the fringes - working her way through club comedy in San Francisco and reaching large, odd audiences through material on Dr. Demento shows - Julie was charting an ambitious course and about to take advantage of traditional media’s desire to get involved with her music video sensibility. To do so, Brown and writing partners Charlie Coffey and Terrence McNally fleshed out a script based on a track off her EP Goddess in Progress
Warner Brothers Pictures was the original developer (owing to Warner’s album ties to Brown) but dropped the project after Temple’s Dunkirk style evacuation from the English film scene caused problems with financing and securing what the studio perceived as a bankable female star - Molly Ringwald and Madonna both passed. French Bank Credit Lyonnais stepped in with a smaller budget but one that guaranteed Temple as the director.
While accounts of the filming contained the usual array of gripes - fussy eyed director, stars Davis and Goldblum living in each other’s mouths and marrying during the shoot - the real grind came afterwards as post production dragged and numerous edits were made. Fully produced “I Like ‘em Big and Stupid” was dumped and “Cause I’m a Blonde” inserted during additional shooting for commercial zip.
Despite marking the open stages of the careers of noted charisma volcanoes Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans and generally being a fun, light comedy the movie’s odd premise and visual style probably contributed to the disappointing 3.9 million box office on 10 million spent.
Given this brace of setbacks Temple effectively ended his exploration of feature film-making, preferring instead to return to music (augmented by his sharp eye for detail) and make the majority of his career since as a well regarded documentarian.
The cast were in the middle of (or went on to) major careers so no real tears for the fuzzies who spent a summer in costume making a movie based off a Dr. Demento song.
I think the only real tragedy here was in having the movie spend a couple more years in release delay hell as various distributors came and went. Though it may not seem like it; 1989 was quite a bit different than 1987 when it came to these viral precursors.
The cultural impact of Earth Girls are Easy is hard to quantify. It’s such a nothing movie but - like the art Julian Temple constructed and immortalized in four minute, stylized bursts for the early years of MTV - the imagery lives on.
You can get in touch with 7 Levels to share your own journeys down the rabbit hole, suggest a starting point for a one-off episode, or just to tell us what you’ve been checking out on the platform.
We’ve all become fascinated with the highs and lows of streaming - join us, won’t you?
“[answering phone] Hello? Oh, Candy! The worst thing in the world happened!
[pause]
No, Bambi's fine. It's Ted. Yeah, the blond thing did not work.”
- Geena Davis as Valerie
7 Levels is a production of Franklin Street Creative. You can contact the show at 7LVLOT@gmail.com
7 Levels: Earth Girls are Easy