The Go-Go’s Deserve Your Respect — A New Documentary Explains Why - Rolling Stone

Belinda Carlisle, Jane Wiedlin and filmmaker Alison Ellwood break down how a new Showtime portrait recounts the band’s story in their own words.

The Go-Go's Belinda Carlisle and Jane Wiedlin discuss filmmaker Alison Ellwood's new Showtime documentary about them.

“We really were unhappy,” frontwoman Belinda Carlisle says.

“We felt like that representation of us was really salacious,” guitarist and singer Jane Wiedlin says.

“But it’s not like VH1 treated us any different than anyone else.

It dedicates time to each of the five women’s childhoods, their punk-rock roots, their love lives (though only when relevant to the music), their do-it-yourself handiness, and their family-like bond before showing them as superstars riding around in convertibles singing “Our Lips Are Sealed.” It’s not a perfect portrait — the film skips over two decades of reunion years — but it succeeds in showing the group’s importance.

When Carlisle and Wiedlin saw the film, they finally felt understood.

“If you look at a band like the Runaways, they’re all talented people, especially Joan [Jett], whom I consider a genius,” Wiedlin says.

“She always was like, ‘My private life is my private life,’ so I didn’t expect that,” Wiedlin says.

“I was really proud of her when I saw that; I was frankly shocked and really pleased because I don’t see how any of that is anything to be ashamed of.” The film also went deeper into the ways that Caffey’s heroin addiction affected the band than Behind the Music, making her decades of sobriety something they’re even more proud of.

“In retrospect, it was a great visual,” Carlisle says, “but we were all kind of disappointed, because we’re not those people at all.

The singer jokes in the film that by complaining about the cover, it’s barred them from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“I thought the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was about innovators, no matter if you like their music or not,” Carlisle says.

“You would think the first or only one of their kind would be recognized by an entity like that.

“Whether you like it or not, you can’t take away our accomplishments,” Wiedlin says.

“I think in some ways, the Rock Hall has discredited themselves … just with the lack of women,” Carlisle says.

Around the making of their Talk Show LP, Schock saw how much the band members who wrote the songs made compared to her and tried to get Carlisle, who also didn’t write songs, to join her in confronting them about what she saw as an inequity.

“I felt like I had no right to say anything because I was such a fuck-up,” Carlisle says in the film.

But more than that, it was an easy decision for her since she felt let down by the band during the making of Talk Show when none of the women would support her desire to sing a personal song she’d written, “Forget That Day.” “One of them said, ‘What makes you think you’re good enough to sing a song?’ which is something I’ll never forget hearing,” Wiedlin says, eyes wide, in the film.

“Everybody was horrified, as to, ‘Did I say that?’ ‘Did I say that?'” Carlisle says now.

“After they approached me, we talked about it, and it was a very emotional conversation,” Wiedlin says.

Jane Wiedlin and Belinda Carlisle.

“But it was so early in the film, it was like, ‘Whoa, where are we going with this?’ The Go-Go’s all got out OK.

I think someone’s trying to make a film about that night, too.” She also had to cut a scene where Carlisle and author Pleasant Gehman were using a Ouija board in the flophouse the Go-Go’s called home, and it spelled out, “This house is a mess.” She decided to skip over the Nineties reunions and the years after, when the group recorded a reunion album, toured, and still faced inter-band turmoil, even ejecting Valentine at one point until they welcomed her back for their recent Broadway shows.

I think just now, because it’s later years and we are winding down, it’s important to be honest with each other.”

I just felt that the point of that song was the perfect thing for the Go-Go’s to say in 2020

“There are four moments in the film where it’s mentioned, and I was fully prepared to pull those scenes last year because I was so sure they were going to be inducted in 2020 that we’d have to remove them

Belinda Carlisle, Go-Go's, Jane Wiedlin, The Go-Go's