THE BIG PICTURE | PATRICK GOLDSTEIN - Wired, blogged and still tuned in
It's easy to be cynical about the gloomy state of pop music today, especially when much of the news is made by knuckleheads like 50 Cent, who will hopefully follow through on his promise to retire now that his new CD failed to open at No. 1, and Britney Spears, who made a sad spectacle of herself at the MTV Video Music Awards.
Perhaps that's why, when I asked Django Stewart about his favorite pop artists, he started rattling off icons like Patti Smith and the New York Dolls, who were stars long before he was born. The baby-faced 16-year-old, who plays a young musician in the film "All Ages Night," already knows the score -- wanting to make cool music today has nothing to do with today's ailing music business.
"The business is crashing," says Stewart, who got cast after the film's director heard his music on MySpace. "Who would want to be at a record company when there are so many other ways to be creative these days?"
Stewart is just one of the fresh faces that populate "All Ages Night," which recently finished shooting around town, including seven nights on location at Chain Reaction, a popular Orange County all-ages rock club that caters to kids younger than 18. What fascinated me about this low, very low budget film was that it captures the Tell-All Culture of kids who live online as well as their rejection of the record industry's outdated star-making machinery.
When I was a kid, the only technology you needed to start a band was an amplifier for your guitar. In "All Ages Night," the guitars and amps are still on hand, but the real action revolves around a host of new media, including webcams, blogs, flash-animated comic strips and camera phones. The first time we see Dylan, Stewart's musician character, he is tapping away on his blog with IMs chiming and a music program playing one of his songs in the corner of the computer screen.
When the filmmakers went down to scout out Chain Reaction, they found 11-year-old boys who already had their own website with music from their band. "These kids are so far ahead of any other generation," says Gabrielle Kelly, who wrote the script with Larry Hama and co-produced the film. "It used to be that you'd wait to be discovered by some A&R scout. But these kids aren't waiting. They have MySpace and YouTube to advertise themselves. The old idea of going to L.A. to be discovered is over. Now you can turn your webcam on and make it in your own bedroom."
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