I'm Not Fascinating—The Movie! The Trailer from danny plotnick on Vimeo.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first screening of I'm Not Fascinating, a 1996 film centered on the arguably terrible San Francisco garage-punk trio The Icky Boyfriends, who were well known for being able to clear a room as soon as they took the stage.
Bandmates Jon Swift, Shea Bond, and Anthony Bedard didn't even have a name for their trio when they were offered a gig opening for the Melvins a few months after the Loma Prieta earthquake, April 8, 1990 the same night as the premiere of Twin Peaks. They called themselves The Icky Boyfriends, and managed to piss off the booker and most of the audience that night, but nonetheless got an offer from a small record label to release their first single. Five years later, as KQED recounts, just weeks before Swift planned to leave the city for good, bringing the band to an end, filmmaker Danny Plotnick shot I'm Not Fascinating, a self-mocking, John Waters-esque, fictionalized day-in-the-life about the band, loosely modeled on A Hard Day's Night.
The film went on to be screened on both coasts, get translated into French, and bring some cult notoriety to the defunct band, which the East Bay Express also recounted in 2014. The film includes scenes shot at the warehouse of long-gone Mordam Records, and at an early location of Aquarius Records, and depicts a scrappy side of San Francisco in an era when everyone had a band, and lived on the cheap. As Bedard tells KQED, "There was almost a reverse snobbery in that if you found out anybody was paying more than $300 a month for rent, they were immediately suspected of being a yuppie."
In honor of the 20th anniversary, Plotnick and Bedard had a high-quality digital transfer of the film made, and they're considering putting it out on DVD.
I'm Not Fascinating - The Movie! screens on Monday, November 21, at Alamo Drafthouse in the Mission. Get tickets here.