In the age of streaming, there’s a widespread belief that every movie is available, all the time, everywhere. Don’t fall for it! Some of the greatest movies ever made are nowhere to be found due to everything from music rights snafus to corporate negligence. In this column, we take a look at films currently out-of-print on physical media and unavailable on any streaming platform in an effort to draw attention to them and say to their rights holders, “Release This!”
At the end of 1999, Entertainment Weekly ran a cover story titled “The Year That Changed Movies,” celebrating the abundance of highwire masterpieces that the American film industry seemed to be cranking out on a weekly basis that year. “Eyes Wide Shut,” “Magnolia,” “The Limey,” “Fight Club,” “Being John Malkovich,” “Election,” “Boys Don’t Cry”, “The Straight Story,” “The Sixth Sense,” “Bringing Out the Dead,” “The Matrix,” and “Three Kings” are just a random sampling, and there were plenty more where those came from.
Unfortunately, the magazine got it wrong — 1999 wasn’t the beginning of something. It was the end, and American pictures would never again be as varied, ambitious, or abundant as they were in the 1990s, an era that saw Hollywood and the independent film community intersect to yield great movies with astonishing frequency. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that one of the very best movies of the year that closed out the decade, “Sugar Town,” was co-written and directed by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss, two of the most gifted filmmakers of the age whose work reflects that magical moment in very different ways.
Anders and Voss first collaborated on “Border Town,” an indie gem set in the L.A. punk scene that they co-directed with cinematographer Dean Lent in the 1980s. Released in 1987 after years in production, the 16mm, black-and-white feature was a model of DIY ingenuity, as the filmmakers turned their limited funds into an advantage. Lacking corporate oversight, they acted like film school David Leans, waiting as long as they needed to for the perfect light since they had all the time in the world and no one was waiting on them.
“Border Radio” was as beautiful as it was scrappy, and it launched all three of its filmmakers into divergent careers. Lent became a reliable indie DP, often working with Voss and Anders; just last year, he made his solo directing debut with the charming coming-of-age story “Feeling Randy.” Voss took advantage of the VHS and foreign sales boom of the 1990s to direct a series of smart genre films like “Genuine Risk,” “Amnesia,” and “Below Utopia.” Working like a termite clandestinely eating his way through the system, Voss was able to inject even the most dubious assignments — like the straight-to-video sequel “Poison Ivy: The New Seduction” — with wit and style.
Anders became the most well-known of the trio thanks to an extraordinary run of personal films marked by their generosity toward both the characters and audience; movies like “Gas Food Lodging,” “Mi Vida Loca,” and “Grace of My Heart” were bursting at the seams with ideas and empathy, and they placed Anders in the pantheon of rising 1990s auteurs alongside Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and Alexandre Rockwell, with whom she would co-direct the ill-fated (but, in this writer’s humble opinion, intermittently charming) anthology film “Four Rooms.”
“Grace of My Heart” was a stone-cold masterpiece, but it didn’t do much at the box office when it came out in 1996, and Anders struggled to get her next project off the ground. Voss, meanwhile, was finding that some of the foreign markets for action movies were collapsing, shrinking the budgets of his meat-and-potatoes genre fare. Determined to make another movie on their own terms, Anders and Voss reunited to write “Sugar Town” in a way that would allow them to make it using a similar methodology to “Border Radio,” albeit on a larger scale with professional actors, most of whom were friends and collaborators from previous projects.
The result was the most purely entertaining film either director ever made, either separately or together. Like “Border Radio,” “Sugar Town” is set in the music industry, though it covers a broader demographic of rock-and-rollers. Using an Altman-esque ensemble structure, Anders and Voss follow musicians ranging from the aspiring but ruthless (Jade Gordon in a pitch-perfect comic performance) to working-class session players (John Doe) and once famous, now adrift pop stars trying to launch a new band (Silverhead and Power Station frontman Michael Des Barres, Duran Duran’s John Taylor, and Spandau Ballet’s Martin Kemp).
There are also friends and family members both in and out of the entertainment business, all of whom are kept in perfect balance by the elegant, deceptively simple structure of the film’s screenplay. The confidence that Anders and Voss developed in their work in the years following “Border Radio” serves them beautifully in “Sugar Town,” a movie that is filled with incidents and ideas but never feels forced or overstuffed. It’s got a lovely, casual rhythm, yet there’s a firm sense of directorial control; it’s somehow sprawling and tight, swift in its pacing but able to take the time for one beautifully observed digression after another.
In fact, one could say “Sugar Town” is a movie comprised of digressions, but the magic of Anders and Voss’ storytelling is that they all feel like part of a carefully constructed, propulsive story. The movie is distinguished by both the technical chops that come from over a decade of making films and the life wisdom Anders and Voss acquired during that time; what makes “Sugar Town” so moving and so original is its avoidance of rise-and-fall music movie clichés in favor of a recognition of how much of a life in the arts — and life in general — is defined not by the peaks and valleys but the moments in between, moments whose significance can often only be appreciated in retrospect.
“Sugar Town” is packed to the edges with moments that are simultaneously minor and monumental, subtle instances where life changes due to a simple gesture or recognition. These moments are marvels of collaboration between Anders, Voss, and their actors, as perfectly executed technical decisions intersect with delicate nuances of performance to maximum effect. When Taylor’s character finally accepts a young boy who has been dropped on his doorstep by an ex-lover as his son, the combination of Anders and Voss’ slow camera move with Taylor’s barely perceptible shift in expression is tender, funny, and poignant — and it’s one of dozens of moments like this in the movie’s compact 89 minutes.
Another comes when Des Barres’ womanizing Lothario — a guy who has spent his life chasing teenage girls and does not, as one of his bandmates puts it, gravitate toward “adult women” — has sex with a wealthy, age-appropriate benefactor (Beverly D’Angelo) and finds his entire world view altered as a result. The postcoital scene between Des Barres and D’Angelo is a marvel, as both actors let their characters’ walls come down for a sweet but pointed conversation that’s honest, vulnerable, and hilarious.
Des Barres has moved between music and acting deftly for decades, turning in fine work in films as wide-ranging as David Lynch‘s “Mulholland Drive” and the Steven Seagal opus “Under Siege” (as well as on television in both iterations of “Macgyver”) but he’s never been better than he is here — and neither has anyone else, from veterans like Rosanna Arquette (as Taylor’s actress wife, unsettled by the fact that she has suddenly aged into auditioning for parts as Christina Ricci’s mother) and Ally Sheedy (as a successful production assistant with a disastrous personal life) to the real-life musicians dabbling in acting here but turning in Oscar-worthy performances.
I don’t know what kind of environment Anders and Voss created for their actors to facilitate such strong work across the board from performers from such varied backgrounds, but there isn’t a false note in “Sugar Town.” Yet for all its authenticity, it’s not a gritty film, or a depressing one — it’s somehow deeply serious in its intent and ideas yet effervescent in its delivery. Anders and Voss would work together again on some very good movies — most notably, co-scripting Anders’ powerful fictionalized account of her own rape, “Things Behind the Sun” — but they would never make one that gives its audience so much pleasure while requiring so little effort in return.
Although “Border Radio” is currently available from Criterion as a supplement-laden special edition, “Sugar Town” is frustratingly difficult to access. It’s never been available in America on DVD, and as of this writing, it isn’t streaming on any platform. Several boutique labels have produced superb discs of Anders’ other films in recent years — in addition to Criterion’s “Border Radio” there are handsomely appointed editions of “Gas Food Lodging” from Arrow and “Grace of My Heart” from Scorpion — so here’s hoping one of them steps up to give “Sugar Town” the release it and its fans deserve.