Who is the movie velvet goldmine based on

Drama Music. Director Todd Haynes. James Lyons story Todd Haynes story. Top credits Director Todd Haynes. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Velvet Goldmine. Photos Top cast Edit. Emily Woof Shannon as Shannon. Michael Feast Cecil as Cecil. Don Fellows Lou as Lou. Ganiat Kasumu Mary as Mary. Ray Shell Murray as Murray. Todd Haynes. More like this. That's why, in the late s in England particularly—now when I was talking about the darkness of how rock got, I was specifically speaking about America.

In England, it was different. It England, it was much more revolutionary than the United States was. The United States revolutionary was leading toward something more aggressive, but financially very successful. In England, it was the fucking Sex Pistols. It was that pure aggression. Pure aggression. No money. The Clash are the perfect example of what happened bringing in to the s.

The Sandinistas, the Iran Contra, everything political that happens in the world, it goes into music and becomes part of the music that people are into because it's what they're attached to at the time. And Todd is a very, very intelligent director. So he intelligently knew growing up in the West Coast of the United States at that time that he was viewing a very different world, but we were all connected through the music. And so it's a good way of reflecting.

You know, music does it very well. Funnily enough in the United States, baseball does it very well, reflects the political atmosphere of the nation. Oh really? How do you think so? If you look at baseball history it always ties in to the economic, social, functional military thing of the United States.

It's just strange. But anyway, music has always been a driving force to pull whatever the political thing is. And glam rock was almost a bracket. In the middle of all this revolution there was like these three year brackets of people just going bananas and dressing up like girls. And it was kind of crazy. They didn't really know what to do with themselves and David Bowie tapped into this unrest. And he did it, Marc Bolan did it, Roxy Music did it. But [Bowie] did it better than anybody.

I don't know. Is it a good piece of art? You mentioned that you really wanted to work with Todd Haynes. What drew you to him and to his work? He's incredibly intelligent but he's also a really sweet person. I had only done a handful of films in small parts, so you know, I was excited that he'd cast me in it, and with the other actors who were far more accomplished and far more successful at the time.

Obviously Ewan was very successful off of Trainspotting. Christian had been successful since he was a little boy, and Toni Collette is just one of the world's great actresses. It was beautiful to be surrounded by these incredibly talented people so young. I was so young. I was so out of my depth. But it was very, very sweet. It was a very sweet movie to do. Velvet Goldmine likely taught many of its young queer fans the same thing.

Though Velvet Goldmine was met with mixed reviews and a dim box office, it found a second life as a cult classic—one particularly beloved by young audiences. As Haynes put it in a interview with The A. Instead the film saves its optimism for its true hero, Arthur. While his idols drive themselves mad trying to stay on the cutting edge, teenaged Arthur is just thrilled to be invited to the party.

Likewise, Haynes and Lyons heavily alter the chronology of Velvet Goldmine, flashing it forward and back along the timeline of glam, as if history were at once utterly elusive and as shapable as celluloid.

The final concert of Brian Slade's space-agey Maxwell Demon persona comes mere minutes into the movie. What happens or doesn't happen onstage--Maxwell Demon appears to get shot during his show--sets loose the central story of Velvet Goldmine: an attempt to piece together the events leading up to this early climax. Many of the shots from the scene echo D. This famous documentary is a record of Bowie's last few concerts before the famed onstage "retirement" of his Ziggy Stardust persona.

The slip here between film and life gets elegantly at the all-too-difficult dream of dying young and staying pretty. After bombing at a music festival, Brian - at this point, still in his long-haired, flower-powered incarnation catches his first sight of Curt Wild. The image of Curt, bathed in glitter and stripped to the skin, hits Brian like a double vision: a glimpse of his own as-yet-unimagined rock future, and love at first sight.

This is probably actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers's finest moment. More a lip model than a great deliverer of lines, he's a genius at capturing vulnerability, confused desire, and calculation in a single expression. Though Wild embodies at least three crucial glam figures, his stage performance is pure Iggy Pop: the audience-confronting, exhibitionist, self-mutilating raw power plant.

McGregor didn't pump or diet enough to match the famously ripped Pop, but in fact his puffiness makes him a good cross between Iggy and the less-than-chiseled Lou Reed.

Curt Wild is given Iggy's working-class Detroit background and gets Reed's back story too: particularly how young Lou was sent off for electroshock therapy to "cure" him of homosexual tendencies. But if Iggy and Lou are the two most famous sources for Curt Wild, they are not the only ones.

Curt's band, for example, is called the Rats as was the original band of Bowie guitarist and collaborator Mick Ronson. In scenes set ten years after glam has faded an exceedingly grim, Reagan-esque , Arthur tracks down Mandy at the dive where she's performing nightly as "the Divine Miss Mandy Slade. Acted brilliantly by Australian Toni Collette, the half-soused Mandy swings between her obviously contrived Brit accent and the shade of her character's original American--the inevitable ruin of self-invention.

This is clearly borrowed from a scene in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, in which the reporter Thompson corners a broken-down, boozed-up Susan Alexander in the club where she's performing, and interviews her about Kane. Like that movie, Velvet Goldmine is built of supposedly "actual" interviews, documentary clips, newsreels, and recollected scenes. Trying to break Slade in America, manager Devine enlists beautiful freaks to simulate the trappings of big-time, crypto-Hollywood-style celebrity.

Maxwell Demon is born--the ultimate role for the ultimate star. For the Ziggy Stardust tour, Tony Defries's American strategy was simple, unheard-of, and to the point: "They had to act like stars so they would be treated like stars. They had to learn to spend money, and spend it in the right way. Wild is bewildered by Devine's biz-speak until Brian breaks in and invites him to make a record. Cool," answers Wild. But I'm on the methadone. I'm getting my act together. And you come here and say you wanna help?

I say, far out. You can be my main man. And so begins the romance at the heart of the movie, which will set worlds spinning and eventually bring them tumbling down. Though Iggy Pop and Lou Reed had already made names for themselves by , it was Bowie who introduced them to British glam culture and Britain to them. They all ended up under the parasol of Tony Defries's MainMan management company. It's here we catch our only glimpse of Andy Warhol whose effect on Bowie was so profound Bowie titled a song after him and later played Warhol in the film Basquiat.

Taking costumes from here, set designs from there, and quotations from everywhere playwright Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, newspaper accounts of Wilde's famous trial , this is the most cinematically glam moment of the movie.

If the archness is in keeping with the sense of beautiful illusion, it also makes everyone seem canned, or at best canny. Lost in this cultural commentary is the wicked intelligence and conversational wit of many actual glamsters - especially Bowie. His real words might best describe the essence of glam's mission. I think it should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself.

In the midst of a decadent free-for-all, Brian and Curt fall into bed together and run off to a recording studio. It's there that things start to go wrong. Did Bowie and Iggy ever do it? Or for that matter, Bowie and Lou? Rumours abounded, but the world may never know - and it's really not the point.

It's a distillation of the truly British element that inspired glam rock - the androgynous, self-conscious, ironic poseur, incredibly alluring to look at but dangerous at the same time - and that element's attraction to the American element: visceral, sexually violent, raw.

That's what glam rock is - a romance between that British element and that American element, and an infatuation that didn't last, didn't work, but produced something really resonant. In a wild, hallucinatory cut-up of images, the various participants get ready for a concert called the Death of Glitter Show, which is intended to lay glam in its grave.

By now Arthur the reporter of is revealed as the glam scenester of and flatmate of glam rockers the Flaming Creatures. Shots of the fan and band going through identical preparations for the night show how glam's public performance included both the musicians and the audience. We could become what we wanted to become just like Bowie.

The fan is as much a participant. There were at least two actual "Death of Glitter" concerts held in the s. In the eloquent phrase of participant and famous husband Michael Des Barres, "The sequins were lying in the gutter.

On the roof of the concert hall after the Death of Glitter show, Curt and Arthur get as close as a star and a fanboy can ever get maybe closer. As stardust falls from the sky, the spaceship that originally delivered Oscar Wilde to Earth reappears. This isn't the last coming together for Arthur and Curt.

Nine years later, after the Tommy Stone concert, Arthur ducks into a bar to discover Curt--just another anonymous denizen of Curt's double-edged closer: "A man's life is his image. You had to go with it and trust it and want to be on a journey. In the film's , the musical scene--represented by animatronic stadium god Tommy Stone--is as grim as the social atmosphere. After rocking Madison Square Garden, he takes the opportunity to wax smug about his tour's lumbering largeness.

The whole thing takes six full-size rigs or three chartered planes to transport. What can I say? I think big! Tommy Stone may have learned a little something about spectacle from the days of glam, but the lesson has been lost on the corporate rocker. Sound familiar? Now it's size rather than experimentation; Reaganite regression rather than anarchy. The crushing weight of Stone's money-makin' circus is inevitably similar to the big-biz, big top of Bowie's Serious Moonlight tour and his famously bad, globally telecast Live Aid performance.