By Peter Landau
The Byrds sang "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star," but they didn't tell the half of it. At least they never partied with Brian Jones, the man who put together the self-proclaimed Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band, The Rolling Stones. Jones lived the rock-star life to its logical conclusion: He consumed so many drugs, and had so much sex, that he lived life fuller than the surviving Rolling Stones, even though he died at twenty-seven of a suicide. Or did he?
No, Jones isn't going to pull an Elvis. He left the building, or rather the pool, when he drowned on the former estate of Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne in 1969. But his death, ruled a "misadventure under the influence of drink and drugs" by police at the time, is painted in darker hues in the new biopic Stoned by first-time director Stephen Woolley.
Woolley is no stranger to controversy, having produced films such as Scandal (1989), about the Profumo affair that involved naked dancers and politicians, played skinfully by Joanne Whalley (Picture: 1) and Bridget Fonda (Picture: 1), and The Crying Game (1992), which, well, see it yourself. But this is his first time helming one of the pictures that he developed.
"I said to the actresses, 'Every time you're naked there's going to be a naked guy,'" Woolley said during a recent press junket in Los Angeles. "That was the deal. I followed through. It was a '60s movie, and in a '60s movie everybody gets to hang out, literally."
Monet Mazur (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3), the blonde Californian who first came to attention on the daytime soap Days of Our Lives and later made viewers' pants come to attention in Whirlygirl (2004), adds to her nudity r?m?laying Anita Pallenberg (Picture: 1 - ). Pallenberg not only made her way through three-fifths of The Rolling Stones--from Jones to Keith Richards and finally a short fling with Mick Jagger--but also made a naked name for herself with such films as Candy (1968) and Performance (1970).
Monet is as impressionistic as her namesake in four skin scenes that leave nothing to the imagination, climaxing forty-four minutes into the film in bed with Jones. And, yes, he shows off his flaccid member, as per Woolley's direction. It's a small price to pay--no offense, Jones, or rather Leo Gregory, who plays him in the film--for a movie that features Monet, within five minutes of its start, getting high, naked, and whipped while blindfolded during a sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll montage that will leave you reeling.
The movie mostly focuses on Jones prior to being booted from the group he founded. He's holed up in his English countryside manor with Swedish cheesecake Tuva Novotny (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3) but still pining for Anita Pallenberg, while playing mind games with hired hand Frank Thorogood, played by Paddy Considine. Thorogood's growing envy of Jones's lifestyle, epitomized by the tiny-topped Tuva, who teases him with her shapely legs before walking off and leaving him blue, leads to Jones's violent end.
It's no wonder. Tuva would drive any man to distraction. She already made heads turn (and glans stiffen) with her nude debut in Slim Susie (2003), but Stoned is her breast exposure yet onscreen.
Woolley may be new behind the camera, but he's no film novice. "The first job I got was tearing tickets at the cinema when I was eighteen and I thought that was it," he says. "Fantastic, they're paying me to watch movies." Those movies included cult hits like The Evil Dead (1981), which he soon started to buy UK video rights to. "I ran a cinema for a long time and showed everything from Thundercrack! to Deep Throat, from [Jean] Cocteau to Russ Meyer."
It was punk rock, though, that began Stoned's twelve-year trek to the screen. "I grew up with The Rolling Stones," he admits. "As a boy there was The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but you weren't supposed to like both. I went with The Stones because they were supposed to be the anarchists. Then I filmed Backbeat and I realized while Mick Jagger was in the London School of Economics, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were taking speed and playing strip clubs and hanging out with existentialists."
Finally seeing The Rolling Stones live in 1976, Woolley thought, "Who are these old guys? I was a big punk fan and I was lucky enough to see The Pistols, The Clash, and The Buzzcocks, and The Ramones came to London, Talking Heads and Television. It was a great time. Compared to Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten, Mick Jagger seemed nothing. They didn't seem relevant to me or the world that I was now living in, so when I read these books about the murder of Brian Jones I realized this was the mad, crazy heart of The Rolling Stones."
Have those old guys in The Rolling Stones seen his movie? "I believe Mick may have seen it, but they've made no comment on it," Woolley says. The movie opens the same day The Rolling Stones play a free concert in Brazil on Copacabana Beach, where 1.5 million people are expected to attend. This is not the first time The Rolling Stones have played free concerts for fans, including one in London after Jones's death and, of course, the infamous Altamont concert where the Hell's Angels, acting as security and paid in beer, killed a black audience member.
"We're like a little mosquito compared to the monolithic Rolling Stones," Woolley opines. "What's in it for them? Nothing's in it for them, to support the film or go against it. I think they're taking a quiet respectful distance."
Not everybody is as indifferent as The Rolling Stones to Stoned. The police contemplated reopening the case of Jones's death when, in the mid-'90s, books began being published with new evidence that he was in fact murdered. There was even a supposed deathbed confession from Thorogood, but it was never signed and therefore inadmissible.
Woolley is moving on. His next project is producing the film version of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, the scathing memoir about Vanity Fair by journalist Toby Young, "which as far as The Rolling Stones are concerned, I've probably already done in my real life," he laughs. There's also a supernatural film, "scary, but not gory," he says, which he plans to direct. In the meantime, we have Stoned and Jones to envy. He certainly got satisfaction . . . for a while.
