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LAYING GHOSTS
MEMBERS GALLERY: Vinnie (Susan Sarandon) and Suzette (Goldie Hawn) go through their collection of rock memorabilia - photos of… well, you guess - finally
forgetting the very
different paths their lives have taken since then.
the banger sisters
As soon as people started to read his screenplay and heard who would be starring in the movie, Bob Dolman began to realise what he had. The Banger Sisters - the double entendre in the title is every bit as rude as you might want to imagine - is the story of a couple of sixties groupies who meet up again in the third millennium.
One, Suzette, has clung on to the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle; the other, Vinnie, has reinvented herself as Lavinia, a squeaky-clean suburban housewife and mother living in that squeakiest-cleanest of environments: Phoenix, Arizona. One of the roles was to be played by Goldie Hawn, the other by Susan Sarandon. But when Dolman first started circulating his screenplay (which would eventually mark his directorial debut), no one was told who was which.
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AGEING ROCK CHICK SUZETTE
(GOLDIE HAWN) HEADS OFF FOR PHOENIX TO FIND HER FORMER
PARTNER IN ROCK ‘N’ ROLL CRIME VINNIE (SUSAN SARANDON).
TOGETHER, THEY WERE A LEGEND: THE BANGER SISTERS. BUT TIMES CHANGE.
OR DO THEY? HAL HAYES FINDS OUT.
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“Half of our readers said, ‘Oh, I see, so Susan must be playing Suzette,’ and the other half said, ‘No, Goldie’s playing Suzette’. And they all had very legitimate reasons for saying that, because we’re talking about two extremely important, successful actresses of our time: Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn. The minute their face appears, you can say, ‘I fell in love with her in this one, or I thought she was fantastic in that’. So what you do with it is, you take that baggage, and you want to play with it, sometimes even [play] against it...”
In fact, it’s Hawn who plays Suzette, still tending bar at the Roxy 30-plus years since Jim Morrison passed out underneath her on the floor of the club’s bathroom. For anyone who remembers Hawn in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, the sketch-based sixties TV show which first made her a star, it’s as if the laughing never stopped. The attitude is the same, the clothes are the same, the lifestyle is the same: the only thing that has changed is her age. And then it stops: Suzette gets fired. Kris Kristofferson might have written the famous line in ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ about her: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…”
Finding herself (not surprisingly) penniless, she sets off in her old blue car - affectionately referred to as ‘the shit box’ - to find Vinnie. Vinnie was her friend. Vinnie was the other Banger Sister - a name, according to the film, bestowed on the duo by Frank Zappa in recognition of their services to the music industry, in the course of which no significant zipper was not unzipped. More to the point, Vinnie may have some money.
Vinnie, of course, is played by Sarandon, and the lifestyle she now leads is where she might have been if the car in Thelma & Louise had paused in mid-air and spooled back into comfortable suburbia. Married to an ultra-conservative lawyer called Raymond (Robin Thomas), Lavinia has two teenage daughters over whom she exercises stern control. If anyone in Phoenix were to find out about her past, the game would be up.
So Lavinia is anything but delighted to see her fellow Banger. “I really am someone you’ve never met before, Suzette,” she says frostily, “and I’d like to introduce myself to you. People change, Suzette. Not that it’s easy: it hasn’t been. But I could not be the person I was because the person I was was not the person I am.”
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