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 dig!
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Director Ondi Timoner on watching a band implode. You’re frontman and songwriter for a band touted as The Next Big Thing. Your albums garner excellent reviews and you develop a reputation for explosive live shows. You get a filmmaker to record your road to rock’n’roll stardom and eventually sign a deal with a major record company. What you do next, if you’re Anton Newcombe of cult psychedelic band The Brian Jonestown Massacre, is appear to willfully sabotage the future of your band and yourself. And because that filmmaker is still hanging around, it’s all on camera.“I think I was like his Leni Riefenstahl,” considers Ondi Timoner, director of Sundance award-winning documentary Dig! “Anton recruited me instantly for his revolution. He was going to take over and I was supposed to document it. He wants to be known for his music but he's got this Catch-22 situation: whenever he signs a record deal he feels like he’s selling out.”  As Dig! progresses, Newcombe, undoubtedly a charismatic performer and gifted musician, finds ever more inventive ways to damage the BJM’s prospects. He starts a potential multi-million dollar showcase at LA’s Viper Room by beating up his guitarist on stage. He attacks members of his audience, disses rival band and movie co-subjects, The Dandy Warhols, in public and, as Timoner reports, by the end of filming had turned on her too. “I called to tell him that the film was done,” she relates. “Three days before I’d had my first child and I was happily calling to tell him we’d gotten in to Sundance. He said, ‘You f**ked up. You didn't clear the music rights. Say goodbye to your son's college education.’”  Newcombe may dominate Dig! but the film is more than a one-man case study. Timoner’s persistence – she shot over 2,000 self-financed hours of footage – offers an illuminating glimpse into music industry machinations, narrated by Dandy Warhols lead, Courtney Taylor-Taylor. “I didn't think they were going to be sell-outs,” Timoner says of The Warhols. “But I thought they were more likely to be able to make some compromises.” They are and have the stadium tours to show for it. As for Newcombe and the BJM, they’re still going, with an ever-changing line-up, helped in no small part by Dig!’s success. “Wherever the film plays in America, the record stores sell out of his records,” Timoner notes with irony. “If he wanted to be known without selling out, I’ve helped him.”
Leigh Singer
Dig!, on selected release 01 July 05.
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