“I’m perfect, but nobody in this shithole gets me, ‘cause I don’t put out!” So snarls Diane Lane’s Corinne “Third Degree” Burns in that great undersung grrrl-group movie from 1980, Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. And that’s just one of many memorable lines in a film that manages to stitch together an immensely satisfying, angsty whole from such disparate elements as the Tubes’ Fee Waybill, LA’s late great (and equally undersung) Black Randy, and, as a Sexy (but babyfaced) Beast in leather, British actor Ray Winstone. Oh yeah, and it’s got Laura Dern, some Sex Pistols, and The Clash‘s Paul Simonon in there to boot.
The hero in all this—mine, anyway—is screenwriter Nancy Dowd, who, in a mere three year span, put her fingerprints on not only the Stains screenplay, but the ones for both Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and George Roy Hill’s Slapshot.
But despite her Academy Award for Coming Home, Dowd fought sexual harassment on the set and later struck her name from the picture. Fortunately, Dowd’s given her due in the wonderful find below. Made to coincide with the film’s 2000 VHS release, it’s a two-part Split Screen documentary on the making of LAG, TFS. Check it out, then, if you haven’t already, go check out the movie.