20th Anniversary Update Of Dandy Warhols/Brian Jonestown Massacre Doc Dig! Will Premiere At Sundance
Last month, members of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, the long-running Portland psych-rock band, got into an onstage brawl while performing in Melbourne. Immediately afterward, the band cancelled the rest of their planned Australian tour. If you’ve ever seen director Ondi Timoner’s 2004 documentary Dig!, the videos from that show looked oddly familiar, even comforting. The Brian Jonestown Massacre have been at this for more than 20 years.
Dig! told the story of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols, two rival psych-rock bands from Portland, and of the frienemy relationship between their respective leaders Anton Newcombe and Courtney Taylor-Taylor. The movie showed the BJM to be creative but hopelessly dysfunctional, while the Warhols came off as relatively stable careerists. Almost every person in the documentary seemed downright insufferable, but that was the gist.
Two decades after Dig! had its premiere at Sundance, both bands are somehow still around. At next year’s Sundance Ondi Timoner will celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary with the debut of Dig! XX, a new expanded version of the documentary. The original film has been remastered, and now it includes an extra 40 minutes of footage that will follow the story of both bands up to the present day. One can only hope that it’ll include that Melbourne fight.