Film on 'The Germs' brings a punk band back to life

NEW YORK — Darby Crash, singer of the Germs and the most polarizing figure on the 1970s Hollywood punk scene, would tell anyone within earshot that his days were numbered.

In 1975, at the age of 17, he devised a five-year plan for achieving immortality: form a band, collect a following, release one album, then commit suicide. The band started as a dare; T-shirts were made before any songs were learned. Its following expanded from a few hangers-on to members of the fast-rising hard-core scene from the nearby suburbs and beach communities. The Germs' sole album, 1979's "GI," sold few copies but influenced much bigger Los Angeles bands, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane's Addiction.

Yet even as the Germs cracked wise and brought a sense of fun and mayhem to the scene, the final stage of Crash's plan (its window inspired by David Bowie's 1972 apocalyptic anthem "Five Years") always loomed. On the night of Dec. 7, 1980, Crash injected a lethal dose of heroin and lay down in his leather jacket.

"When he died," said Don Bolles, the band's drummer, "it was as sad as you could be about something you knew was about to happen." But Crash's final set piece would be upstaged by the murder of John Lennon in New York City the next day. It's taken 28 years longer than planned, but thanks to a new film and an unlikely Germs reunion, Crash might finally become the mythical star that he sacrificed everything to be.

The film, "What We Do Is Secret," did not take quite as long to come to fruition, but Rodger Grossman, the movie's director and its screenwriter, has spent much of the past 15 years scrambling - and sometimes stumbling - to make it. Grossman, 42 and a Los Angeles native who studied film at Wesleyan University and worked with the B-movie producer and director Roger Corman, came up with the idea in 1993, the year a Germs anthology was issued on CD. But the slyly grinning band and its harsh, pounding pop had transfixed him since he saw Crash perform in "The Decline of Western Civilization," Penelope Spheeris's 1981 documentary about the Los Angeles punk scene.

The third punk movement to get going after New York in '75 and London in '76, the Los Angeles variety references the previous two: from New York, leather and tough-sounding band names; from London, spiky hair and the notion that looking good holding a bass is just as good as playing it. Los Angeles was much more decadent, and performance there was often less spontaneous, more well-plotted pageantry. By this standard Crash was the perfect leader. He would smear himself with peanut butter, or cut his chest knowing well that Iggy Pop had done it (better) before.

"Darby believed a dead legend is a true legend," Grossman said. "He felt that it's important to seal your legacy. It's Warholian. It's the death image. Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. That he seals it himself, that was what really drew me to the story. Darby was one of the first modernist heroes. His story resonates on so many different levels. It's a punk rock story. It's a story about homosexuality. It's a story about nihilism. And it's a story about Hollywood."

With no connections, no rights to the music and no budget, Grossman pursued and eventually enlisted players from the original scene for guidance, uncovered hours of video and audiotape and convinced the three surviving Germs (the guitarist Pat Smear, the bassist Lorna Doom and Bolles) of his sincerity.

Money for "What We Do Is Secret" was raised B-movie style, with personal investments from a disparate and sometimes unreliable series of benefactors. "We finally did get a commitment from a rich lady in Texas who started writing checks," Grossman said. "She wrote $500,000 worth of checks toward a very comfortable budget, and then she got lupus and disappeared. We shut down without ever having shot a frame of film."

To pay the bills, Grossman said, he took on all sorts of day jobs: vice president for business development at a company that created entertainment content for mobile devices, cameraman on a documentary TV series, even shooting high school reunion videos. As preproduction dragged on, many of the actors - including David Arquette, who was set to play Crash - moved on to other projects. Of the originally cast Germs, only Bijou Phillips (who portrays Doom) remained when filming finally began in 2005.

The new Darby Crash was Shane West. Best known for playing Dr. Ray Barnett on the television series "ER" and starring opposite Mandy Moore in the 2002 weepie "A Walk to Remember," West seemed an unlikely choice. But few knew that he was a second-generation punk. "I was born in 1978," he said. "My parents could have been listening to Fleetwood Mac, but they happened to listen to the Ramones and the Clash instead." When he auditioned for the role, West was performing with his own pop-punk act, Johnny Was. He immediately embraced the part.

The surviving members tutored the Baby Germs (Smear's term) for three months. "I got the chills the first time I heard him sing," Doom said of West's work as Crash.

It would be yet another potentially terminal budget collapse, in 2004 and lasting more than a year, that would give new life to the actual Germs. The exhausted cast and crew of "Secret" held a dark-humored wrap party for a film that had yet to be shot. "We thought, 'This is it,"' Phillips said. "Let's just have a big show to celebrate all our hard work."

Rumors began to circulate that the Germs might reunite as a one-time-only event. Tickets for the party, at the Hollywood club Dragonfly, quickly sold out, and then, after a short set by the Baby Germs, the surviving members joined West to perform Germs songs like "We Must Bleed" and "Caught in My Eye." It was their first show since a farewell at the Starwood club on Dec. 3, 1980, at which Crash promised the crowd, "You won't see this again."

"The audience flipped out," Phillips said. "I thought it was perfect."

The Germs and West booked some shows and performed on the 2006 Warped tour, and by the time filming had finally completed last year, he was formally inducted as the band's new lead singer. "We are the first band to embrace the actor from the biopic as their singer and then go on to perform together like nothing happened," Bolles said.

Now, as the band begins to promote the film's release Friday in the United States, West has been a Germ nearly as long as Crash was.

"Darby would totally appreciate a teen idol actor from 'ER' playing him," Bolles said. "We get recognized at clubs. Shane gets recognized at airports. He said he was going to be huge, Darby did, and nobody really ever believed him. I think this is another part of that long last laugh."