He has been hailed since his death for his musical tastes and his rockumentaries, but what I always liked about Jonathan Demme was how attuned he was to the classic punk-rock sensibility. He came of age in the 1960s, but his fledgling film-making career finally took off contemporaneously with punk’s emergence in New York and London between 1975 and 1977.
His movies, especially the early ones, shared some of that DIY, learn-on-the-job, something-out-of-nothing aesthetic of early punk. He was older, but he got it right away. He’d been a stringer at the end of the 1960s for scrappy, Detroit-based Creem, the magazine that actually coined the term “punk rock” in 1971. His directorial debut, 1974’s Caged Heat, was scored by John Cale, The Fall’s Hip Priest accompanies the final confrontation in The Silence of the Lambs, and The Feelies rock out in Something Wild. And he made three movies with Neil Young, granddaddy to three generations of feedback-deafened punks. And something called Stop Making Sense.
Then think of everything that early punk-rock, with its self-taught artists and rickety economic underpinnings, had in common with Roger Corman’s ultra-cheapo New World Pictures in the early 1970s. Corman’s earlier proteges – Coppola, Scorsese, Nicholson – were now at Hollywood’s top table, and Demme joined the likes of Paul Bartel (Death Race 2000), Joe Dante (Piranha) and Allan Arkush (Deathsport) at the last studio expressly catering to the drive-in circuit during its slow fade.
If you could come up with a cheap, fast way to rip off a big studio’s blockbuster idea, shoot a zippy little spoof or copycat, then coast in the slipstream of its promotion budget in the hope of confusing enough moviegoers to recoup your own budget (Jaws 2, meet Piranha), you were going places with Team Corman. In that environment, producers might show up, rip 30 pages from the script and say, “Halve your locations, double your set-ups per day, and we just scored six hours on an abandoned oil-rig set before they demolish it, so rewrite accordingly.”
Throughout his career, even on his later big-budget material, Jonathan Demme’s movies gave one the sense of a perfect kind of chaos being deftly marshalled. His best movies were his early ones, where that feeling of chaos and improv is mirrored by the economic dislocations that beset his characters, such as the broke milkman Melvyn Dummar in Melvyn and Howard. No matter how many awards he won, Demme never lost that sympathy and affection for small characters, which is also pretty punk rock.
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