The other day, I wrote a post about GG Allin after I saw a documentary by Todd Phillips about GG, "Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies," which is floating around because Phillips directed "The Hangover," which is a pretty popular movie this summer.
Afterward, I got an email from Alex Godfrey, a London-based journalist, who, years ago, worked for Hotdog, a UK-based magazine that I wrote a few pieces for. In any case, Alex emailed me an interview he did back in the day with Phillips about "Hated" and a later movie Phillips made, starring Tom Green, "Road Trip."
Kind Alex agreed to let me repost the interview here. Thank you, Alex, for sharing it with the rest of us.
First off, I saw Hated a couple of years ago.
Did you see the real version, or did you see the British version, which has been censored, by the way. If you bought it in England through Exploited, that video’s censored.
Right, I saw one on the shelf in Virgin here yesterday, remastered and uncut.
Yeah, that’s the one you should see. It’s just taken out a lot of the great scenes, I haven’t seen the British version, I forget the specs that I got sent to me, which was what was getting cut out, but there’s some great stuff cut out of it. The DVD is what you should get ‘cause it has an hour of extra. That’s at Virgin also. So go ahead.
I had a GG bootleg from Germany and Hated wasn’t half as obscene as that.
It is though. You gotta get the real movie, I swear it is.
Why was it censored in Britain?
I don’t know, that happens a lot there, it really does. I don’t know why.
You’ve got Tom Green in Road Trip, who’s known as being kind of extreme and outrageous. What would you say the difference is between someone like him and someone like GG?
I think there’s a fine line. I think it’s more the times that have changed, I swear, you know you look at guys like Eminem and Marilyn Manson and you think, Boy, if GG was alive today I think he’d be on the cover of Rolling Stone, I really do. Or at least he would have two years ago, I think it’s over now but he’s a guy who could have broken if he’d stayed alive.
The mainstream didn’t want to know about him.
You gotta remember GG died before Kurt Cobain hit, he died before grunge became big. Not like he was grunge, but there was grunge and then there was Green Day and Rancid and all that crap. There could have been a window there for GG. Granted it would have lasted 45 days because musically he wasn’t all that talented, but there could have been a moment.
How much time did you spend with him?
A lot, I would say about six months. Not with him every minute, but he was in New York and I was just showing up and tagging along.
How did you get involved with him in the first place?
I met his brother Merle in New York. I was at NYU, I wanted to do a documentary on GG, so I met Merle, I told him I wanted to do a documentary, and Merle said “Well he’s in jail, write him in jail.” So I wrote him in jail and GG said, “Well I’m getting out of jail in two months but I’m on probation, I can’t leave Michigan, but if you send me a bus ticket, fuck it, I’ll just come.” So I said okay, and I got him some money and I sent him a one-way bus ticket, literally which is how the movie begins, and he showed up. And from that point on he was wanted. They were looking for him and they finally caught him in Texas and extradited him to Michigan where he served one year while we edited the movie. He got out literally three days before the premiere in New York. He showed up to the premiere, saw the movie, and he was drunk and he ruined the whole screening because he was throwing beer bottles at the screen, and hit a woman in the head in the front row, she was bleeding, we had to stop the premiere. He walks out. Three days late after that he died. So it was really weird. It was crazy.
Why did you want to make a documentary on him?
Same reason why I wanted to use Tom Green in Road Trip, I mean you say it’s such a difference from Hated to Road Trip, but really you know… Tom Green’s a big part of Road Trip and he’s just – to me, guys who are very enigmatic, guys who have that something, whether it’s exhibited on stage while he’s naked and cutting himself up, or exhibited by making funny faces and bizarre noises, whatever, they’re both extreme characters in what they do, and I’m drawn to that, and always have been.
How aware was GG of his impact on society?
I really think he wasn’t, he’s one of those sad cases where after he died it became like, wow man, if he was only around to see this, and you know, maybe that has to do with the fact that he died, but he wasn’t; he truly was that guy, he truly lived out of a paper bag-
He really didn’t care for money.
He really didn’t. It’s so funny because everybody… there’s so many people who will act like that and be like that. He was the real deal if anybody ever was, he really was. You look at a guy like Marilyn Manson who I appreciate because I appreciate stage-shows, and I appreciate that rock and roll exhibitionism, but that is calculated, that may as well be done, and I know everybody knows this, but it may as well be some big producer behind it pulling all the strings and making it happen, he’s a man-made product, he’s…
Trent Reznor created him.
That’s what I mean, he’s man-made, Trent Reznor created this product, right. GG Allin was the real deal. He was pure evil too, it wasn’t an act; he was a bad guy.
Was he insane?
I think he was insane, yeah. And he certainly had a split personality.
Really.
Oh, yeah. Yeah I mean because you could hang out with him and rent a movie, and watch a movie with him, and two seconds later he’s throwing a beer bottle at you for you to leave, for no reason. He was crazy. But I loved him.
I read a quote from you about the thrill of making a film, and the spectacle. That marketing the film is just as important.
Well at least 50% of a documentary is your subject matter, so maybe that’s what you’re referring to, or, I don’t know what the exact quote is, but I might have been high on cocaine when I said it.
At a screening of Hated in Kansas someone set fire to the curtains?
Yeah. And in a Minneapolis screening someone stabbed someone. And there was a riot in Munich.
And did you get a mental patient on stage to sing?
That was in this little German town. But there was a riot in Munich because the projector broke. Always happens. But anyway, yeah that’s just part of the fun. With Hated you’re dealing with extreme fans, you know, especially in Germany because GG was a legend there, he never made it over to Europe because he couldn’t get a passport ‘cause he’s been in and out of prison. So he was bigger there in a weird way because he was legendary, they’d only heard the stories, you know what I mean? So we got some rowdy people. But that’s why you make a movie, you make a movie for people to see it hopefully, or at least that’s why I do it. Filmmaking is far too expensive a medium for it to be a hobby. You know, you do it so people will come, hopefully.
Is it true that you were going to make a documentary on John Wayne Gacy?
Yeah, it was going to be Death Row: The Last Days of John Wayne Gacy, but he died. And fucking Geraldo Rivera paid the prison a kickback, a huge amount of money to lock him up, meaning lock up an interview with him, and not let him do other press, and then he never ended up doing it. But Gacy was onboard to do this other documentary with me, which would have been very fucking cool.
Sound like Natural Born Killers.
Yeah that’s right, that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to break him out too.
Do you like Natural Born Killers?
I love it. I love it.
Apparently Stone wanted Geraldo for that Robert Downey Jr part.
Oh really? That’s funny. I never knew that.
Where would you put yourself on the map, as a filmmaker?
Well you know whether you’re doing documentaries or narratives or comedies, you know, you’re telling stories, you know what I mean, and you know… I did as much writing on Frat House as I did on Road Trip. As I said, you write these movies, the documentaries, or at least that’s the way I do ‘em. So ultimately it’s all storytelling. I don’t draw the line between documentaries and features like so many people do. So many people consider documentaries as the ugly stepsister to filmmaking. I love it, I think it’s a great way to express things I wanna see and show, so I love documentaries.
What would GG think of you now?
That’s a good question. I mean I still hang out with his brother. I think he’d still like me, I don’t know what he’d feel about Road Trip, but I know he would have liked Frat House. And I know he would have liked parts of Road Trip, but ultimately he would have gotten drunk and thrown a beer bottle at the screen and hurt somebody. I don’t think he would have made it through it.
--Interview by Alex Godfrey
