As OC Weekly print readers nearing Medicare age know, your humble servant contributed a weekly news digest column called A Clockwork Orange, which some allege was a precursor to Navel Gazing. Remnants still exist somewhere on the webby-nets and in my garage.
Well, I am happy to report that some Hollywood types have released a documentary on the cultural tsunami I created called A Clockwork Orange County. Uh, check that . . .
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Yes, there is now a film out there called A Clockwork Orange County, but my only connection is I've written extensively about the movie under its previous title, We Were Feared, which borrows footage from Paul Young's crude 1981 documentary Urban Struggle: The Battle of the Cuckoo's Nest, which you may have seen in a bootleg bin at Vinyl Solution.
Jerry Roach of Cuckoo's Nest: Not Dead
Let us drift back not to the mid-'90s through early aughts (when A Clockwork Orange the column reigned supreme)–let alone 1971 (when Kubrick's disturbing film came out) or 1962 (when
Newport Beach Film Festival: We Were Feared Premiere
We Were Feared/A Clockwork Orange County time-trips itself, back to the fast rise in 1977 and hard fall in '81 of old school punkpressario Jerry Roach's controversial nightclub the Cuckoo's Nest in Costa Mesa, where everyone from Iggy Pop and
the Ramones to Black Flag and the Circle Jerks performed, the West
Coast hardcore punk sound took hold and what you kids now call the mosh
pit may have been born. Essentially shut down as a club by the city, the building was later swallowed up by arch-enemy neighbor Zubie's before both were torn down years ago and paved for a Goat Hill industrial site.
Attitude Counts at We Were Feared World Premiere
The documentary has been warmly received, but like Roach, the Cuckoo's Nest and all the assorted A Clockwork Orange-named incarnations cited here, it was steeped in controversy from the start.
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Punks Vs. Suits: A copyright dispute spices up Sunday's world premiere of the Cuckoo's Nest film We Were Feared
Directed by Jonathan W.C. Mills, and featuring the archival footage Roach hired Young to shoot back in the day, the 92-minute documentary features the likes of Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra, Keith Morris,
Edward Colver, Pat Brown, Steve Soto, Jack Grisham, Joe Escalante, Duane
Peters, Steve Olsen, Chuck Dukowski and the irrepressible “Roach Motel” owner himself speaking about the scene on camera–then and/or now. Many of those talking heads appeared on stage with Mills at Newport or last year's Hollywood premiere at the Arclight.
We Were Feared Premiere @ the Arclight Hollywood
Producer York Shackleton, of acting-snowboarding fame, cut a deal with Los Angeles-based Celebrity Home Entertainment, which obtains and licenses films for cable, on-demand, online streaming and online retail through companies like Netflix, Blockbuster and Amazon. Speaking of which, you can now pick up what is now A Clockwork Orange County here: http://amzn.com/B0081L6NH4. It's a steal at $9.95.
OC Weekly's We Were Feared acrhives
Here is the trailer:
If the trailer, this post and all the other links included here do not satisfy your thirst for knowledge on this topic, try visiting: www.celebrityhe.com or www.facebook.com/fearthismovie.
Tell 'em Clockwork Coker sent ya!
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.