The four actors who star in the VH1 movie "Daydream Believers: The Story of the Monkees" got a little taste of what Monkeemania was like in the late '60s.
Early into the filming, the faux Monkees spent two days in front of an audience of teenage extras re-creating the group's first concert appearance. "There were about 500 to 1,000 extras, and they were mostly girls," recalls George Stanchev, who plays Monkee heartthrob Davy Jones.
"It was craziness. They wanted autographs and pictures. They made posters of us. We had to be driven from the set to our trailers because they were waiting outside. Every time we stepped out of our trailers they would be waiting and screaming for us."
"It was incredible," echoes L.B. Fisher, who plays Monkee Peter Tork. "Once, I was coming out of the trailer and all of these girls jumped on me. They said, 'Can we have a hug?' I couldn't even move my hands. It was weird. I think they thought we were like the Backstreet Boys or 'N Sync or we were just a new band doing some '60s tunes."
"Daydream Believers," which airs tonight on the music video cable channel, tells the story of how four young actors--Tork, Mike Nesmith, Jones and Micky Dolenz--beat out hundreds of hopefuls to be cast in "The Monkees," an NBC comedy about a fictional rock band of the same name.
The series, which premiered in September 1966, was an overnight sensation, as was their first single, "The Last Train to Clarksville." Their music producer, Don Kirschner, lined up an impressive stable of composers, including Neil Diamond and Carole King, to write songs for what some critics called "the pre-Fab Four."
During the two years the series aired, the hits came fast and furiously, like "I'm a Believer," "I'm Not Your Steppin' Stone," "A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You," "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and the song that lends its name to the movie's title, "Daydream Believer." At one point, the group even outsold the Fab Four themselves, the Beatles.
However, for the first two albums, Kirschner had studio musicians lay down the tracks, and then the group sang to the prerecorded tracks. Nesmith and Tork, both trained musicians, fought and eventually won the battle to play their own instruments and write songs.
The film concludes with the cancellation of the Emmy Award-winning series in 1968 and the disastrous response to their 1968 feature film, "Head," which was written by Jack Nicholson.
