"If I had a good-sounding rapping voice, this film would never have happened," Geremy Jasper says.
Jasper, writer-director of Patti Cake$ and the former lead singer of the indie rock band The Fever (In the City of Sleep, Red Bedroom) would rather be making hip-hop records. "But because my voice is so [bad]," he says, "I had to come up with this alter ego. I just sound like a whiny kid from the suburbs of New Jersey."
While this sounds like a lament, Jasper is in a remarkably good mood. That may be because his debut feature earned him a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and top honors at the Berkshire International Film Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival.
It played at a special screening with the Arkansas Film Society on Thursday night (with producer Noah Stahl in attendance), and it opens in Little Rock on Tuesday.
The movie stars Australian Danielle Macdonald as Patti Dombrowski, a 20-something white Jersey girl who dreams of becoming a rapper while struggling to make ends meet as a barmaid and a catering server, and living with her unsupportive, alcoholic mother Barb (Bridget Everett), whose own show biz dreams were scuttled.
In the Mix
While The Fever's dreamlike tunes sounded more like the music Barb used to wail, Jasper says the movie mightn't have worked had Patti sung the same type of music he did.
"Hip-hop is the most popular genre of music in America right now. There are kids in their early 20s, and the only music they know is hip-hop. That's been on the TV set and on the radio since they were born. Rappers are the new rock stars. Rock stars don't exist anymore. Guitars are for dinosaurs," Jasper says.
Having grown up on Yo! MTV Raps and seeing rappers like MC Lyte, who has a major role in the movie, Jasper has an affinity for hip-hop as well as rock (the soundtrack includes a tune from Bruce Springsteen) and is quick to point out that both genres have black roots.
"You can't beat Robert Johnson. That's for damn sure," Jasper says. "But some Jersey cop (Nickel, played by WassStevens) wouldn't know who Robert Johnson is, but his hero is Eric Clapton. Eric Clapton is doing something similar to what Patti is doing. It all gets mixed up. It's always exciting when different genres combine to create something fresh."
Macdonald may have been new to rapping, but she learned to rock the mic, and Jasper learned to write rhymes that sounded credible coming from her lips.
"It was a lot of trial and error. I would write them and demo them. They could sound good or need some work, and then Danielle would come in, and I would try some different flows ... different turns of phrase. I was constantly rewriting and tweaking," he says.
Home Away From the Range
Similarly, Manhattan, Kan.-born Bridget Everett had no qualms switching or combining genres. Her New York-based cabaret band features former Beastie Boy Adam "King Ad-Rock" Horovitz on bass. Everett's comedy-singing act (captured on her hilariously raunchy album Pound It!), is thriving while Barb is stuck singing karaoke in dives. Everett's live sets can run an hour or two, and she has had choice moments on Inside Amy Schumer, where Jasper discovered her.
"She also looked like someone I would see at the bar," Jasper says. "She looked like she could be related to the image in my brain of who Patti was. It didn't matter to me that she had never done anything dramatic. There was just something about her monologue on stage that just made me think, there's depth here."
"I have a lot of work still left to do," Everett says. "But I can definitely pat myself on the back now that I don't have to put on an apron and take an order. I would feel that way in my 30s -- as if life was just passing me by. Luckily in my 40s, things took a different turn. I think whenever you're doing something different and outside of the box, it takes people a while to catch up and acclimate to what's happening. It just took a while. I started this type of performance 15 years ago. It's nice that it's finally catching on fire."
Nonetheless, despite making her first dramatic performance in a movie, Everett said it was remarkably easy to feel Barb's pain and occasional hostility.
"Barb is not as good a singer as Bridget Everett is, but I think that she does have talent, so I didn't want her to be just like a joke when she got up and sang. It makes the story more compelling if you see that she really has something," Everett says. "I feel like the mother-daughter Patti and Barb are like both sides of a young Bridget Everett. Like there's a dreamer that wants to get out and somebody that doesn't fully believe in themselves. Small towns are small towns. There's a real similarity between Manhattan [Kansas] and Jersey. There's the same kind of bars. You meet the same kind of people, and you're making the same kinds of mistakes."
Keeping It Almost Real
Jasper may be lucky that bars can look so similar across America because shooting in his native Garden State wasn't an option for the whole film.
He says he scrambled to find locations all over the New York metroplex when there are individual towns in Jersey that could have single-handedly accommodated Patti Cake$.
"It was a magic trick, unfortunately," he recalls. "That's the chip I have on my shoulder. Jersey doesn't support filmmakers, so we had to shoot 70 percent of the film in New York. All the interiors are New York. (New Jersey Gov.) Chris Christie cut the film initiative ..."
If Jasper had to use sleight of hand to make viewers think they were looking at New Jersey, he and Everett are annoyed by musical performances in movies that don't look or sound authentic and worked diligently to make Patti Cake$ as realistic as it was upbeat.
"Sometimes you're watching a show, and there's a restaurant scene, and you look and an extra's sleeping but nobody caught it," Everett says. "It's interesting where your eye can go and what can take you out of it. Luckily, Geremy is very clear in what he wants to see. If he wasn't getting it from us, we just did it again and again and again."
"It makes me insane when I see, like a guitar player whose playing all the wrong chords, who doesn't have a pick and his guitar isn't plugged in or a drummer who's playing a completely different beat," Jasper says. "That stuff makes me insane."
MovieStyle on 08/25/2017