We Got That Attitude: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains with a Fiery Diane Lane

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains went from a non-hit to a cult classic to a riot grrrl handbook, but is it all that? It is. And it isn't. Here's an extended version of a post I wrote for The Stranger's Line Out blog in 2011 before it disappeared from the internet.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS
(Lou Adler, USA, 1982, 87 minutes) 

Girls can't be rock and rollers. It's the facts of life.
--Billy (Ray Winstone)

Cursed with too much attitude, a young soap star acts up and loses her job. Abandoned by her father and orphaned by her mother, Pennsylvania teenager Corinne "Third Degree" Burns (a fine and feisty Diane Lane), who lives with her exasperated Aunt Linda (an unrecognizable Christine Lahti), starts a punk band with her sister, Tracy (Marin Kanter, who had appeared in Kathryn Bigelow's directorial debut, The Loveless, the year before), and her cousin, Jessica "Dizzy Heights" McNeil (Laura Dern, also very good). 

Unlike many youth films of the 1970s and '80s, all three young women were real-deal teenagers, which added a verisimilitude that helps to compensate for other problems. Though Kanter, who would retire by the end of the decade, was 19 during filming in 1980, Lane and Dern were 15 and 13 respectively, and they hold their own with the seasoned actors in the cast.  

In Charlestown, people consider her a has-been, but Corinne's attitude proves a blessing to her music career. After she catches a gig by the Losers--a baby-faced Ray Winstone with members of the Clash and the Sex Pistols (Paul Cook, Steve Jones, and Paul Simonon)--she finds a way to join their US tour. And with that, Ladies and Gentleman, the Fabulous Stains is off to the races. 

A cult hit in the 1980s, the film has since become a how-to guide for female rockers, like the riot grrrls who have cited it as an inspiration, most recently Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre) in her rollicking memoir, Rebel Girl.

Tobi's dad, Eldon, was into laser discs at the time, and Tobi [Wilcox] lobbied hard for him to rent a disc about an all-girl punk band called Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, but it wasn't available. Luckily, her uncle taped it off TV and we watched it on a Betamax tape. The three of us lay on our stomachs with our chins in our palms, transfixed as Diane Lane, playing the lead singer of the band, yelled, "I'm perfect! But nobody in this shithole gets me because I don't put out.--Kathleen Hanna (HarperCollins, 2024)

While non-musician Winstone as Billy rocks out convincingly, Tubes front man Fee Waybill, who had appeared in Robert Greenwald's rock musical Xanadu two years before, leads the Metal Corpses, "old farts" in platform heels and face makeup coasting on an old--and not very good--glam-rock hit. The three mismatched bands end up on the same tour bus.

It doesn't seem completely plausible that an untested and unsigned band--only three rehearsals to their name--would land a national tour so quickly, but stranger things have happened, and it sets the scenario in motion. 

Suffice to say: the men do not welcome the women, and in a matter of speaking that was happening behind the scenes, as well, since the woman who wrote the script, Slapshot and Coming Home writer Nancy Dowd, was so unhappy with the finale that she gave herself the credit Rob Morton.

Then again, the Losers and the Corpses don't get along all that well either, and the girls only piss off the crowd at their first show, but Corinne's attitude does attract attention, along with her new bi-color hairstyle and skimpy outfit--she rejects the black pleather catsuit provided by Rasta promoter Lawnboy (Barry Ford) in favor of a pinup girl look with black panties and a see-through top that plays like Frederick's of Hollywood gone punk--though no one could have pulled that off quite like Lane, who would do much the same when she played a rock singer in Walter Hill's 1984 Streets of Fire.  

On the way to California, one of the Corpses becomes an actual corpse, but the tour pushes on without them. In a framing device, entertainment journalist Alicia Meeker (St. Elsewhere's Cynthia Sikes), who's been covering Corinne since her acting days, reports on the tour. Soon, Tracy and Jessica have dyed their hair blonde and black, and now the trio looks less like the Runaways and more like a weird Rocky Horror hybrid, which may not be completely coincidental, since Adler, a music and movie producer, was behind the 1975 screen version of Richard O'Brien's cult-classic musical.

To the surprise of the Losers, audiences prefer the Stains. Their female fans, who call themselves Skunks, even start to dress like them. 

All of this might seem feminist, except The Fabulous Stains sends a decidedly mixed message. For one thing, cinematographer Bruce Surtees, a frequent Clint Eastwood collaborator for nearly 15 years, ogles the band and their fans, traveling up fishnet-covered legs and focusing in on the ladies' nether regions. The intention may have been empowering, except his upskirt-style camera work feels invasive and objectifying, not least because two band members were underage, though his celebration of the color red is hard to deny. I've seen worse, and you probably have, too, but I expected better.

Furthermore, there's a fine line between standing up for yourself and being a bitch. As was often the case with her juvenile performances, like Cherry Valance, the beautiful "Soc" she played in Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, Lane sells the material like the pro she was, but the film has trouble distinguishing between the two, possibly because Adler saw punk more as a look or an attitude than an ethos; a rejection of the corporate mentality that characterized the music industry of the 1970s.  

The comments at The Stranger in response to my original post were mostly in praise of the film--readers were just happy I had called attention to it.

Few seemed to notice that I had given it something other than a rave. It's better than stirring them up, which wasn't my intention, but I was disappointed that no one had the same qualms. It's a fun film in a lot of ways, and I can easily recommend it, but it's troubling, too, and I'm not even certain what it was trying to say in the end. According to David Chiu in a fine piece for The Quietus, "Dowd's original ending for the script saw the Stains conquer America and tour the world as their fanbase grows." Adding insult to injury, a crew member even groped the Oscar-wining screenwriter.

By the epilogue, the band has morphed into something else--something popular, yes, but with all their original rough edges sanded away. Punk wasn't meant to last forever, and it didn't, but they come across as sellouts. 

Though Lou Adler, in the tacked-on ending, presents the new incarnation of the Stains as something good, it's a pyrrhic victory. Then again, maybe the ladies were never truly punk in the first place--they were just Rust Belt kids playing at something they didn't really understand. They tried, they failed, and what they were at the end is what they were always meant to be.

 

For more: Melissa Anderson ably captures the film's complexities.

As of 2022, Ladies and Gentleman, the Fabulous Stains was available on region-free Blu-ray from Imprint. Unfortunately, it's now sold out, but can be streamed from the usual pay operators. Special features include commentary tracks from Lou Adler, Diane Lane and Laura Dern, and the late cult-film critic Lee Gambin and Bratmobile singer Allison Wolfe. Images from Scopophilia (Lane), The Quietus (Lane, Kanter, and Dern), The Grindhouse Cinema Database (Skunks), and Imagine! Belfast (Kanter, Lane, and Dern).