Sid and Nancy

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Sid and Nancy
A film poster for Sid and Nancy.
Directed by	Alex Cox
Produced by	Eric Fellner
Written by	Alex Cox Abbe Wool
Starring	Gary Oldman Chloe Webb David Hayman Debby Bishop Andrew Schofield
Distributed by	Samuel Goldwyn Company
Release date(s)	November 7, 1986 (USA)
Running time	112 min
Language	English
Budget	$4,000,000
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Sid and Nancy, originally titled Love Kills, is a 1986 film directed by Alex Cox. It emerged during a period of renewed fascination in the life of the Sex Pistols member Sid Vicious. It stars Gary Oldman as Vicious and Chloe Webb as his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.

Contents 1 Production 2 Reviews 3 John Lydon's reaction 4 Soundtrack 5 Factual errors 6 Cast 7 External links 8 References

[edit] Production

The movie is largely based on the mutually destructive, drug and sex-filled relationship between Vicious and Spungen. Vicious's mother, Anne Beverley, initially tried to prevent the movie from being made. After meeting with Cox, however, she decided to help the production. Some of the supporting characters are composites, invented to streamline the plot.

Oldman lost weight to play the emaciated Vicious by eating nothing but steamed fish and "lots of melon",^{[citation needed]} but was briefly hospitalized when he lost too much weight. Vicious's mother also gave Oldman Vicious' own trademark heavy metal chain and padlock to wear in the film. Courtney Love narrowly missed out on the role and was cast instead in a minor part. Love is reported to have pleaded, "I am Nancy Spungen."^{[citation needed]} Cox was impressed by Love's audition but has said the film's investors insisted on an experienced actress for the co-leading role. Cox later cast Love as the lead in his movie Straight to Hell alongside Joe Strummer.

Webb and Oldman improvised the dialogue heard in the scene leading up to Spungen's death, but based it on interviews and other materials available to them. The stabbing scene is fictionalized and based only on conjecture. Cox told the New Musical Express: "We wanted to make the film not just about Sid Vicious and punk, but as an anti-drugs statement, to show the degradation caused to various people is not at all glamorous."

The original music is by Pray for Rain, Joe Strummer and The Pogues.

The film was rated R in the USA for drug use, language, violence, sexuality and nudity.

Prominent musicians made appearances in the film, including: Iggy Pop, The Circle Jerks, Edward Tudor-Pole of Tenpole Tudor and future Hole singer Courtney Love.

[edit] Reviews

Roger Ebert gave Sid and Nancy a four-star review for The Chicago Sun-Times, writing that Cox and his crew "pull off the neat trick of creating a movie full of noise and fury, and telling a meticulous story right in the middle of it.^[1] In a subsequent article on Gary Oldman, Ebert referred to the movie's titular couple as "Punk Rock's Romeo and Juliet."^[2]

Leslie Halliwell, on the other hand, had no praise for the movie: "Some have said stimulating, most have preferred revolting. Consensus, an example of the dregs to which cinema has been reduced." He also cited a line from a review that appeared in Sight & Sound: "Relentlessly whingeing performances and a lengthy slide into drugs, degradation and death make this a solemnly off-putting moral tract."^[3]

The movie was hailed by most critics, ^{[weasel words]} although some expressed concern that it glamorized drug use, ^{[weasel words]} while others have criticized the portrayal of Sid's friend and ex-colleague John Lydon as too abrasive and one-dimensional. ^{[weasel words]}

In his book Sid Vicious: Rock N' Roll Star, Malcolm Butt describes Webb's performance as Spungen as "intense, powerful, and most important of all, believable." Issue #117 of Uncut Magazine (February 2007) ranked Gary Oldman as #8 in its "10 Best actors in rockin' roles" list, describing Oldman's Sid Vicious as a "hugely sympathetic reading of the punk figurehead as a lost and bewildered manchild." Conversely, Andrew Schofield was ranked #1 in the "10 Worst actors in rockin' roles" for his performance as Johnny Rotten - described as a "short-arse Scouse Bleasdale regular never once looking like he means it, maaan."

[edit] John Lydon's reaction

Lydon criticised the movie in his 1994 autobiography, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs:

"I cannot understand why anyone would want to put out a movie like Sid and Nancy and not bother to speak to me; Alex Cox, the director, didn’t. He used as his point of reference - of all the people on this earth - Joe Strummer! That guttural singer from The Clash? What the fuck did he know about Sid and Nancy? That’s probably all he could find, which was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. The only time Alex Cox made any approach toward me was when he sent the chap who was playing me over to New York where I was. This actor told me he wanted to talk about the script. During the two days he was there, he told me that the film had already been completed. The whole thing was a sham. It was a ploy to get my name used in connection with the film, in order to support it.

"To me this movie is the lowest form of life. I honestly believe that it celebrates heroin addiction. It definitely glorifies it at the end when that stupid taxi drives off into the sky. That’s such nonsense. The squalid New York hotel scenes were fine, except they needed to be even more squalid. All of the scenes in London with the Pistols were nonsense. None bore any sense of reality. The chap who played Sid, Gary Oldman, I thought was quite good. But even he only played the stage persona as opposed to the real person. I don’t consider that Gary Oldman’s fault because he’s a bloody good actor. If only he had the opportunity to speak to someone who knew the man. I don’t think they ever had the intent to research properly in order to make a seriously accurate movie. It was all just for money, wasn’t it? To humiliate somebody’s life like that - and very successfully - was very annoying to me. The final irony is that I still get asked questions about it. I have to explain that it’s all wrong. It was all someone else’s fucking fantasy, some Oxford graduate who missed the punk era. The bastard.

"When I got back to London, they invited me to a screening. So I went to see it and was utterly appalled. I told Alex Cox, which was the first time I met him, that he should be shot, and he was quite lucky I didn’t shoot him. I still hold him in the lowest light. Will the real Sid please stand up?

"As for how I was portrayed, well, there’s no offense in that. It was so off and ridiculous. It was absurd. Champagne and baked beans for breakfast? Sorry. I don’t drink champagne. He didn’t even speak like me. He had a Scouse accent. Worse, there’s a slur implied in the movie that I was jealous of Nancy, which I find particularly loathsome. There is that implication that I feel was definitely put there. I guess that’s Alex Cox showing his middle class twittery. It’s all too glib, it’s all too easy."^[4]

In a later interview, Lydon was asked the question, "Did the movie get anything right?" to which he replied: "Maybe the name Sid."[1] Alex Cox claimed that Lydon's hatred of the movie was "understandable, given that it was based on incidents from his life and centered around one of his friends."[2] The other remaining Pistols have been far less outspoken about the movie than Lydon, although Lydon claimed that Paul Cook was more upset over the movie than he was. [3] Paul Simonon of The Clash criticised the movie for its portrayal of Lydon: "People have the wrong idea of [Lydon] -- like some sort of fat, bean-slurping idiot like in that Alex Cox film. That pissed me off, making him look like an idiot...John has a fantastic wit, a wicked sense of humour."[4]

[edit] Soundtrack

The official soundtrack contains no songs by either the Sex Pistols or Sid Vicious.

• Love Kills (Title Track) - Joe Strummer
• Haunted - The Pogues
• Pleasure And Pain - Steve Jones
• Chinese Choppers - Pray For Rain
• Love Kills - Circle Jerks
• Off The Boat - Pray For Rain
• Dum Dum Club - Joe Strummer
• Burning Room - Pray For Rain
• She Never Took No For An Answer - John Cale
• Junk - The Pogues
• I Wanna Be Your Dog - Gary Oldman
• My Way - Gary Oldman
• Taxi To Heaven - Pray For Rain

[edit] Factual errors

The film includes a large number of factual errors.

• One scene shows Spungen giving Vicious the chain and padlock necklace that would become his trademark. This was, however, given to him as a present by Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders.
• Poly Styrene, the lead singer of the punk band X-Ray Spex is depicted as white, rail thin, with long, straight hair and no braces on her teeth; in reality she had a healthy figure, short curly hair, braces, and is Anglo-Somali.
• Throughout the film, Vicious is seen wearing a red vest with a Hammer and Sickle in the centre, which he wore in The Great Rock and Roll Swindle. In real life, however, Vicious's insignia was the Nazi Swastika.
• The inclusion of the Sex Pistols’ Today Show TV incident (with Bill Grundy) is out of place. The event occurred in December 1976, when Glen Matlock was the Pistols’ bassist. Sid didn't join the band until February 1977. Also, the dialogue of the interview as depicted in the film is wrong.
• The film features Sid playing at Winterland, San Francisco with "NANCY" carved onto his chest; this is a distortion of when Sid played at the Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas with "GIMME A FIX" carved onto his chest.
• The scene depicting the Pistols playing at San Francisco shows Johnny Rotten saying to the crowd “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”, before the Pistols begin playing "Problems." However, Rotten actually said this at the end of the gig, just after the Pistols played their final song of the encore, "No Fun." Also, this was the final gig the Pistols played before they broke up, yet the movie shows them playing more shows after San Francisco.
• The movie shows Paul Cook and Steve Jones walking out of the band leaving John and Sid. This is inaccurate because it was John who walked out on the other Pistols (Steve and Paul stayed with Sid and Malcolm McLaren, appearing in and recording songs for the movie The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle).
• In the scene at the Spungen household, Sid and Nancy are singing to the Sex Pistols’ song "Bodies" on a single. However, "Bodies" was never released on a single format (it was only on the Never Mind The Bollocks album).

[edit] Cast

• Gary Oldman ... Sid Vicious
• Chloe Webb ... Nancy Spungen
• David Hayman ... Malcolm McLaren
• Debby Bishop ... Phoebe
• Andrew Schofield ... Johnny Rotten
• Xander Berkeley ... Bowery Snax, drug dealer
• Perry Benson ... Paul Cook
• Tony London ... Steve Jones
• Sandy Baron ... Hotelier in New York
• Sy Richardson ... Methadone caseworker
• Edward Tudor-Pole ... Hotelier in London
• Biff Yeager ... Detective
• Courtney Love ... Gretchen
• Rusty Blitz ... Reporter
• John Spaceley ... Chelsea resident
• Coati Mundi ... Desk clerk
• Ed Pansullo ... Detective
• Vincent J. Isaac ... Detective
• J. Steven Markus ... Detective
• Anne Lambton ... Linda
• Sallie Anne Field ... Singer
• Kathy Burke ... Brenda Winczor
• Sara Sugarman ... Abby National
• Mark Monero ... Jah Clive
• Michele Winstanley ... Olive McBollocks
• Andy Bradford ... Dick Bent
• Tom Little ... Publican
• Barbara Coles ... Reporter
• Pete Lee-Wilson ... Duke Bowman
• Graham Fletcher-Cook ... Wally Hairstyle
• Stuart Fox ... Rock Head
• Victoria Harwood ... Hermione
• Jude Alderson ... Ma Vicious, Anne Beverley, (as Judie Alderson)
• James Snell ... Edward
• Niven Boyd ... Rock Head's trainer
• Miguel Sandoval ... Record company executive
• Richard W. Barker III ... Sid's minder
• [Patti Tippo]] ... Tanned and sultry blonde
• John M. Jackson ... Lance Boyles, MD
• Peter McCarthy ... Hugh Kares
• Desirée Erasmus ... Mrs. Hugh Kares
• Gloria LeRoy ... Granma
• Milton Selzer ... Granpa
• Bruce J. Magrane ... Andy
• Stefanie Auerbach ... Betty
• Jeffrey Kumer ... Buzz
• Bradley Lieberman ... Chipper
• Tricia Bartholome ... Mary Jane
• Jeanne McCarthy ... Trell (as Jeannie McCarthy)
• John Snyder ... Vito
• Ron Moseley ... Wax Max (as Ron Moseley Jr.)
• Fox Harris ... Old Stain
• Iggy Pop ... Prospective guest
• Suchi Asano ... Prospective guest (as Suchi)
• Pray for Rain ... Guitarist (as Dan Wul)
• Mitch Dean ... Drummer
• Chuck Biscuits ... Kittens (as Circle Jerks)
• Circle Jerks ... Kittens
• Greg Hetson ... Kittens (as Circle Jerks)
• Earl Liberty ... Kittens (as Circle Jerks)
• Keith Morris ... Kittens (as Circle Jerks)
• Angel Dove ... Punkette
• Sherice Prince ... Punkette
• Kelly Louise Lynn ... Punkette
• Sri Johnston ... Punkette
• Jamie L. Crowe ... Punkette
• Julie Marie Capone ... Punkette
• Julie St. Claire ... Punkette
• Raymond Rosario ... ABC Kid
• Daniel Louis Rivas ... ABC Kid (as Daniel Rivas)
• Favian Xavier ... ABC Kid
• Al Alli ... TV interviewer
• Bob Ellis ... Fireman
• Peyton Kirkpatrick ... Fireman
• Jimmy Emig ... Chelsea child
• Alexander Folk ... Riker's guard
• Dick Rude ... Riker's guard
• G.J. Thompson ... Dancing kid
• Lawrence Bell Jr. ... Dancing kid
• Rome Jefferson Jr. ... Dancing kid
• Cat Vicious ... Smoky
• Alex Cox ... Man sitting in Mr. Heads room
• Peter Jaques ... Priest carrying bottle of whisky
• Ken Leicht ... Punk rocker
• Jaynie Sustar ... Punk rocker

[edit] External links

• Sid and Nancy at the Internet Movie Database
• Sid and Nancy at GaryOldman.info
• Sid and Nancy page on Alex Cox website
• Criterion Collection essay by Jon Savage

[edit] References

1. ^ Roger Ebert's Four Star Movie Guide by Roger Ebert. (1988, Andrews & McMeel) p.280.
2. ^ Roger Ebert's Four Star Movie Guide by Roger Ebert. (1988, Andrews & McMeel) p.383.
3. ^ Halliwell's Film Guide: 11th Edition by Leslie Halliwell, edited by John Walker. (1995, HarperCollins) p.1033.
4. ^ Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs by John Lydon, with Keith and Kent Zimmerman. (1994, Hodder & Staughton Ltd) pp.150-151.