Episode 6: Legacy — “Any Amount Of Spotlight That Gets Shined On This Movie Is Not Bright Enough”: Josie And The Pussycats Becomes A Cult Classic
After flopping at the box-office, Josie And The Pussycats develops the most unlikely pop culture legacy writes Maria Lewis.
“Legacy!” shouts Alexander Hamilton in the seminal moment of the hit musical Hamilton. “What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.” The opportunity to witness your own legacy within your lifetime is unique and it’s one the writers and directors of Josie And The Pussycats Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont totally didn’t expect. Because even though the biting pop culture satire was hustled out of cinemas within a month - not with a bang, but with a whimper - the movie didn’t disappear. You know, like you would expect for something critically and commercially bombed. That’s the beautiful thing about pop culture though: people want to write the story of a movie in a weekend but films, books, television, comics, they can have a long tail. Just because something’s not an instant hit doesn’t mean it a) doesn’t have merit or b) won’t go on to find its audience months, even years after the fact. “There’s another film that I quite frequently compare it to: it’s Speed Racer by the Wachowskis,” says Mo Shafeek, label manager at Mondo Records. “Speed Racer is another gem, another bomb, another movie based on a beloved property that trafficked in ideas that were maybe a little too big for the film as expected. I think about both of those films and one of the things that the Wachowskis get accused of is being so God damned earnest. I was rewatching Josie before this call and it’s sincerity, right? Speed Racer and Josie are kind of about sincerity in your art and sincerity in who you are in the face of change and fear and doubt and there’s something sort of timeless about that message.”
That message was not lost on Eva and Sam Hendricks of the power pop band Charly Bliss out of Brooklyn. Even though Josie And The Pussycats had been stamped ‘big loss’ by the studio Universal and the pop culture world shuffled on pretty quickly, the film was quietly indoctrinating a whole generation of young fans on home entertainment. “It’s so good, it’s so good that I used to watch it every day after school,” says Eva. “It’s the only movie that I know every word to the entire movie … Also, I think looking back now, I didn’t really have that many other examples of women fronting a band that I had seen. It’s such a movie about girl power. You know, obviously that ended up being something that I was very attracted to in my life and something that I wanted to pursue in my life later on. I can really trace it back to this time in my life where I was watching this movie about three lady best friends starting a band and taking over the world. Even like the silly line that Val is always saying to Josie “who’s a rock star?” It’s silly but it’s so much about them supporting each other. Obviously that’s one of the main plot points of the movie - that they’re brainwashing Josie into being a diva - but the crux of the movie is that they’re all supportive of each and think the world of each of other.” Outside of their killer live shows, the brilliant song writing, the way they reboot the nineties sound for a modern audience, one of the defining traits of Charly Bliss as a band is their collective love of Josie And The Pussycats to the point that for a Halloween show in 2016, the whole band dressed up as the Pussycats and played covers of the movie’s soundtrack. “As a drummer, I grew up playing along to Blink 182 and I was obsessed with Travis Barker as was any drummer back in the day,” says Sam. “So any outlet to play in this style I was like ‘oh my God, yes!’”
Interestingly across the other side of the world, Josie And The Pussycats was profoundly impacting the career of another artist: Amandah Wilkinson in Australia. “I think I saw a trailer in the cinema obviously when I was going to see something else,” she says. “I’d known about the Josie And The Pussycats comics, so I knew that existed, and at the time I was obsessed with Rosario Dawson and also Rachael Leigh Cook was like the girl of the time because that movie with Freddy Prince Jr … I had also just started guitar lessons as well so I was learning to play music. I was in eighth grade, I had just picked up guitar, so when this came out I was ‘oh yeah, cool – it’s an all-girl rock band!’ which was my dream! Because to be fair, when you’re in high school in eighth grade there isn’t a whole lot of girls playing drums or bass or guitar or being front people or singing. I feel like that was still at the point where it was seen as a very male thing to do. And I mean, we’ve still got a long way to go in terms of that, but at the time it was just so apparent: ‘oh, girls don’t do band stuff’.” After making her sister see the movie with her, Wilkinson became obsessed with not just the film but the soundtrack as well as she began to hone her guitar skills by playing Josie And The Pussycats over and over again. “I was immediately obsessed with it and also immediately obsessed with the soundtrack when it came out … This was in the midst of when I was a sponge, I mean, everyone’s still a sponge. This was like my formative years. I basically learnt how to play every single guitar part and bass part on that record by ear and that was just from playing it over and over again, listening to the lead guitar parts, listening to the rhythm guitar, listening to the bass, and just learning how to play all of it. I would spend hours replaying that record and learning how to play all the riffs on it … It was such a formative film and record for me. Also, it’s this cult pop culture moment where I think a lot of people know about and there’s a lot of fans about, but it’s obviously not talked about so much. When you guys called me to do this, I was like ‘hell yeah!’ because it was such a huge part of me, a huge part of me getting the balls to just kind of – well, not even the balls, the pussy! – to come through and try and start something when all the odds were against me and everybody told me I wouldn’t make it or I’d fail.”
Josie inspired Wilkinson to start her own hugely successful teenage rock band – Operator Please – who toured the world and won an ARIA Award. And just like Josie and the girls in the movie, Operator Please kind of got chewed up and spat out by the music industry following the release of their second album Gloves. There’s more to it than that, with Wilkinson copping a lot of shit from people in the Australian music industry especially as not just a woman, not just a young woman, but a woman of colour. She went on to form Bossy Love in Glasgow years later with Dananananaykroyd’s John Baillie Jnr and they’re not only hugely great, but hugely successful. Yet her whole experience with Operator Please just made her appreciate Josie And The Pussycats even more. “I didn’t realise how linear my journey was with the film until you kinda said it,” she says. “I can point things out like ‘yup, yup, yup that’s right’ and it’s even funnier now that I’ve been through – you know, bar the mind control thing – I’m sure there’s other ways that happens apart from headphones. After being through and seeing firsthand this kind of stuff, it’s funny to watch that movie because a lot of people will think ‘oh this is hyper reality’ and I’m like ‘nah nah, this is real’ … At the baseline, it’s pretty accurate. Even the songs, they’re amazing pop punk songs with really great riffs and yeah, I just love that record … I listened to the entire record and I was like ‘oh my God!’ You get something in the back of your stomach, it’s like a memory and nostalgia coming back.”
What’s fascinating about all this is while folks like Eva and Sam from Charly Bliss and Wilkinson from Operator Please were being so profoundly affected by the movie to the point they’re forming hugely successful bands because of this love and basing their entire careers on it, the filmmakers were mostly unaware. Kaplan said that the movie flopping as hard as it did was like going to a funeral, but the first indication they had that Josie And The Pussycats was enduring was through social media. “It really wasn’t until about five or six years ago when people started to say ‘this is the reason I picked up a guitar’ or ‘I was a girl and I started a band’ or ‘I watched this movie every weekend’,” she says. Yet the film’s star Rachael Leigh Cook got an inkling earlier thanks to a younger sibling. “My brother was in college in 2002, only a year after the movie came out, and he was studying film and they studied the movie in his class,” she says. “Because the teacher really got it, so … I was like people are getting this.”
Part of the film’s enduring appeal for IRL rock star Bif Naked - who sang backing vocals on the soundtrack – was how relatable she found it to not just her experience, but the experience of the women in the music business around her. “Obviously Josie And The Pussycats is the cutest story of a girl band, basically, and coming up in the music scene in the Pacific North West where I lived it was all about the riot girl. Ultimately I kinda self-identified as a real do it yourself feminist, touch chick. Josie And The Pussycats was like the first time really girls got to see that kind of representation … These characters are very self-assured, self-aware females and especially at that time in my life it was very important to me. This story is a timeless story … I think it mirrors every woman’s career, really, because there’s always going to be that dream that you strive towards, that hopefulness, the setbacks, the climaxes when you triumph over your obstacles.” It’s hard to say exactly what it is that makes a cult film a cult film. It’s partly down to timing, partly down to luck, partly down to an underdog sensation as its limited audience because feverish about helping others see it. Whatever the fuck it was, slowly, but surely, Josie And The Pussycats became a beloved cult flick. “It took a while,” says Garth Franklin, film writer and founder of Dark Horizons. “It was one of those movies that just vanished for a good few years and it probably wasn’t until this decade - probably in the last five or six years - there was a re-emergence of people like ‘oh my God, do you remember that movie?’ Kind of a love and appreciation grew for it, especially among the younger female audience. Because a lot of the female audience that was targeted at the time - you know, they were teens then - are now in their twenties, they never clued in after it. It’s the ones that came in after them, the kids, that have really clued in to it.”
The nostalgia ingredient was a huge factor, obviously, and this is a big part of why Letters To Cleo’s Kay Hanley – aka the singing voice of Josie - is entirely unsurprised it became a cult classic and lived on way after its brief time on the big screen. “I’m not surprised in a way,” she says. “Because so much of what the female driven zeitgeist of the nineties … there’s a reason that it’s resonating again now. It’s cos it was fucking good. And for a lot of reasons that movie was just ahead of its time. I think I also have a little bit of a distortion on it because the soundtrack has always been, like, people have always flipped out about the soundtrack ever since the soundtrack came out people have wanted to talk to me about it. So when people started catching on again, that the movie was just as good and was really misunderstood at the time, I was like ‘of course!’ It made complete sense to me.”
It was also the “very cartoonish” villainy of the narrative, Hanley says, that people inside the business – including U2’s Bono - connected with. The commentary on the music industry and commercialism and the subliminal messaging was also one of the things that stood out to the late, great Adam Schlesinger of Fountains Of Wayne and co-writer and co-producer of the Josie soundtrack. “It’s funny because the music business has obviously changed a lot in some ways,” he says. “Also I think just the general sense that the music business is evil is the same. I liked that part of it. I mean, at the time it sort of went over a lot of people’s heads but I think it was sort of prescient in a way.”
Cult films were able to become cult films without social media and connectivity in the past - Rocky Horror, Valley Girl, Army Of Darkness, The Warriors, Heat, every John Waters film ever made – but in the specific case of Josie And The Pussycats, connectivity and social media is when the film’s cult status started to manifest in earnest. That’s how Cook found out about Ethan – who goes by Amalgam Comics on Twitter – who watched Josie And The Pussycatsevery day for a year and charted his journey with the hashtag #JosieQuest. That’s the kind of feverish fandom Josie And the Pussycats inspires: it also inspires endless features and listicles about why it was ahead of its time, how it was misunderstood upon its release, why it’s the best movie of all time, why Josie And The Pusscyats means so much to the millennial generation and so on until infinity. All of these pieces started popping up in the last five or so years and although Josie And The Pussycats might have never done what they hoped it would do at the time of its release in 2001, it has gone on to do a lot more. “I don’t think anyone sets out to make a cult film,” says Kaplan. “Everyone sets out to make a film that you think will connect, then somehow you accidentally make a cult film if you’re lucky. You either make a total failure or you make a cult film, so thank God.” Elfont agrees: “In my darkest years, while we were making the movie, it may have been even a couple days after shooting the scene with Parker (Posey) in the control room area, I was up and night. You do have these panicky moments and I did have that moment of ‘oh fuck, we’re making a cult film’. It’s campy, it’s broad, who is going to go see this movie? You tend to have those thoughts anyway, about whatever, but it really was kind of this panic … what you don’t see there is people will be talking about the movie for years if it is a cult (hit) - that’s great!”
Cult films by their very definition acquire a fanbase, they don’t necessarily start out with one, and Josie And The Pussycats has certainly been acquiring that shit like it’s Pokémon over the past two decades. “I’m just so happy the movie is so damn enjoyable, you know what I mean?” says Cook. “Because a lot of things don’t date well. Yes, this is dated – it’s now 20 years old – but that doesn’t mean it’s not just as great as it was then.” For someone who specialises in cult film and cult fandom, this conversation couldn’t be more important to Shafeek. “What truly triggered everyone into thinking that Fight Club was essential cinema, you know?” he says. “We’ve had three great music parody films in our lives: we’ve had This Is Spinal Tap, Josie And The Pussycats and we’ve had Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping … Any amount of spotlight that gets shined on this movie is not bright enough, we need to all make this the most important film of all time.”
This article is a written version of the Josie And The Podcats episode Legacy. Josie and the Podcats is a limited podcast series hosted by best-selling author, screenwriter and journalist Maria Lewis, and produced by Blake Howard of One Heat Minute.
