The Pavement Musical and Museum Exhibit Were Part of Alex Ross Perry’s New Pavement Movie
That absolutely bonkers Pavement jukebox musical, and the equally surreal pop-up museum, weren’t just stilly stunts to celebrate the indie band’s latest reunion tour — they were silly stunts for a new Pavement movie directed by Alex Ross Perry.
Perry revealed the broader machinations in a new New Yorker piece that offered a look inside the rehearsals for Slanted! Enchanted!: A Pavement Musical, which briefly ran in New York City earlier this month. The movie wasn’t exactly being kept a secret, either. As Perry — who’s probably best known for his 2018 punk flick Her Smell — noted in a follow-up email to Rolling Stone, there was proper signage at both the museum exhibit and musical alerting attendees that the proceedings were being filmed for a movie. (Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield even quietly noted the film’s existence in his glowing review of the musical.)
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“It just stands as a testament to the fans belief in Pavement Power that the notion of visiting a painstakingly curated Pavement Museum or a lavishly staged Pavement Musical was so logical, so obvious that relatively few people stopped to think if there might be more going on than meets the eye,” Perry said. “As is typical with Pavement, and has been for over thirty years, the answer is both yes and no.”
Perry told The New Yorker that Pavement’s label, Matador Records, approached him about a project three years ago, but frontman Stephen Malkmus had certain conditions: He didn’t want a documentary, but he didn’t want a movie with a traditional screenplay either.
As Perry puts it: “No one knew what that meant.”
The solution will apparently be a movie with a little bit of everything, with Perry describing it as “like throwing spaghetti at the wall.” It’ll reportedly be kind of like a biopic but also a tour documentary, as well as a glowing tribute to the band, among other things. The jukebox musical and the retrospective museum exhibit (“Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum”) will feature in it, too, and they help illuminate Perry’s guiding thesis for the film: What if Pavement was the most important band ever?
To many, of course, Pavement is the most important band ever. And Perry’s thesis technically ran contrary to another instruction Malkmus gave him early-on: “Avoid legacy trap.” As the director told Rolling Stone, this became his “ground rule,” which he tried to adhere to by totally upending.
“‘The Pavement Hagiography’ movie is not something the band would have fun participating in, nor I making,” Perry said. “But to conceptualize this notion, and create a movie within a world where Pavement Hagiography is a given was — to reference the staging of the museum and the musical — way of having my cake and inviting thousands of others to eat it.”
Considering this surreal blend of fact and fiction — or as Perry put it to The New Yorker, “Legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical” — it’s no surprise to hear the director sum up his Pavement project by turning to the various documentaries, mockumentaries, and movies about (or by) Bob Dylan.
“You take the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie [I’m Not There], the Scorsese documentary [either Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story or No Direction Home], the Pennebaker documentary [Dont Look Back], and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates [Renaldo and Clara] and put them all in a blender.”
This story was updated 12/19/22 @ 6:03 p.m. ET with additional quotes from Perry to Rolling Stone.
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