Twisted Sister Documentary Nearing Completion
Twisted Sister Documentary Nearing Completion
January 16, 2014
The upcoming documentary film ‘We Are Twisted F*cking Sister!’ is almost finished, and director Andrew Horn is reaching out to fans in order to raise the money needed to complete the film.
‘We Are Twisted F*cking Sister!’ is the story of Twisted Sister’s ten years playing the bars prior to their breakout in 1983. The movie has been a long time coming and now it’s almost there. Director Andrew Horn has put together a crowdfunding campaign at www.indiegogo.com/projects/twisted-sister-the-movie in order to raise money for the film’s completion, in exchange for some great rewards.
Also new promotional clips from, and about, the movie are going online every few days at www.facebook.com/TwistedSisterTheMovie.
While the microcosm of Punk/New Wave was being born in Manhattan in the mid ’70s/early ’80s, Twisted Sister was battling their way to the top of a suburban, cover band bar scene, that surrounded New York City in a 100 mile radius, yet existed in a parallel universe. Twisted began as cross-dressing glam band playing four shows a night six nights a week of cover songs in New Jersey bowling alleys and Long Island beach bars, and fought their way to the top of the chain, where monster clubs attracted audiences of up to 5000 a night. It was both a great living and a dead end because once you reached the peak, there was nowhere to go but out. As big as they were on that circuit, in the eyes of the world — ie the music establishment — they were nothing but a bar band.
If you think you know them from their hits, the MTV videos and their stadium shows, this is the untold story of how Twisted Sister became that band — full of weird and often pretty hilarious twists and turns. It’s about Rock ‘n Roll and the business of Rock ‘n Roll. It’s about finding yourself, finding your audience and doing literally anything, however wild, to connect with them. And even though we know how it ends, the roller coaster ride of getting there is what it’s all about. A mesmerizing, and wickedly funny story of a ten year odyssey to overnight success.
Guitarist Jay Jay French says, “the history of Twisted is really those 10 years in the clubs. The years we spent clawing our way through the bar scene. It was learning how to make order out of chaos, how to confront bad situations, how to win in bad situations, and prepare us for the future. And it was unique to Twisted. I talk to hundreds of bands and nobody’s ever gone through what we went through. It’s who we are, and it’s why we are, and why we do what we do.”
Andrew Horn is a filmmaker, journalist and Emmy winning researcher for documentaries. Of his films, ‘East Side Story’ — a documentary on film musicals made by the Communists — was included in the year’s Ten Best List in Time Magazine and ‘The Nomi Song’ — a documentary about the New Wave singer Klaus Nomi — won the Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival and was named in the year’s Ten Best of VH1. His films have shown worldwide and appear in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the British Film Institute, Deutsche Kinematek, and Cinematheque Francais.
Horn says, “I first met Twisted Sister when I interviewed lead singer Dee Snider and guitarist Jay Jay French while researching my previous film, The Nomi Song. Jay Jay then appeared in the film describing the wild scene that erupted when Nomi, a German operatic counter-tenor and performance artist, was booked to open for Twisted Sister in a club in suburban New Jersey. After the film was completed, Jay Jay and I spent an afternoon with him filling my head with stories about Twisted’s own wild shows in the bars. Jay Jay’s description of what he called ‘bar band shtick’ (the various ploys they used to engage their crowd in the bars) sounded to me like it’s own kind of performance art — just for a whole other type of crowd. This sounded interesting and the more I followed up on it the more I realized there was a real story there. And it became much bigger than I ever imagined.”
Courtesy of www.sleazeroxx.com