Joan Jett Makes a Schrader Movie

On the Set of "Light of Day" with Michael J. Fox

I went to Cleveland in late 1986 to visit the set of the Paul Schrader film Light of Day (released to mixed reviews of all kinds on Feb. 6, 1987). I was writing a story for Newsday's Sunday magazine about Joan Jett, Long Island's second most famous rock star after Billy Joel, for those who don't know. (I know Pat Benatar sold more records, but she didn't stick around Lindenhurst, N.Y. after stardom beckoned.)

In the movie, she and Michael J. Fox are brother and sister, factory workers by day, and at night members of a Cleveland band called Barbusters, which also featured Michael McKean, the comedy writer and actor of This is Spinal Tap acclaim. Jett is a neglectful single mom whose child is being raised by their mother, played by Gena Rowlands. Being a Paul Schrader movie, there is a lot about faith and reconciliation, responsibility and artistic ambition. Critics wrote about Schrader's Calvinism, and the movie really needed to be more Hobbesian: as in "Calvin & Hobbes." To provide some context, the prolific writer/director's two previous films were The Mosquito Coast (1986), and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985). In Light of Day, in one of the angriest mother-daughter scenes: Jett's character screams at her mom (again, the fabulous Gena Rowlands, who died at 94 on Aug. 14, 2024): "You took my problems to a minister!?" This was definitely a Paul Schrader movie.

And this was not a rock video. I knew it was a real Hollywood movie because a Teamster picked me up at the airport and took me to the set at the Euclid Tavern, a Hall of Fame Cleveland landmark: A neighborhood saloon turned must-play for touring bands in the midwest. After watching the Barbusters play, I went to Joan's trailer, where a menagerie of fascinating people wandered through. I also interviewed Schrader, McKean, Michael J. Fox (a child star from the TV series Family Ties coming off his pinnacle film Back to the Future) in which he also played some guitar. Fox was just 25 when the movie was released; he was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's in 1991.  

I had been friendly with Kenny Laguna, Jett's manager and record producer, since the late 1970s. My first wife and I had dinner one night with Kenny and his wife Meryl, still-married high school sweethearts, when they had an apartment in Long Beach. He had returned from England after doing some recording work for The Who's production company. The Steve Gibbons Band had its biggest hit in the UK with a cover of Chuck Berry's "Tulane" in 1977, produced by Laguna.

Meanwhile. Joan Jett, a former member of the exploited L.A. 1970s girl group the Runaways, was in London, doing an expatriate turn. She recorded an album, Joan Jett, that was a minor success in Europe and the UK that no American label wanted. Laguna played us some tapes of what would become Jett's U.S. debut album, Bad Reputation, and said he was thinking of going all-in with Jett. One of the few things my ex-wife and I agreed on was telling him: "Go for it."

Kenny, Meryl, and Joan, moved to a spacious home in Rockville Centre, L.I. The first people I knew with a big screen projector TV in the early 1980s, I'd go to their house on Sundays after my divorce to watch football and smoke pot with Kenny, and Joan, a passionate sports fan. Laguna had his perversities: He was a Dallas Cowboys fan. Whether I was at his house or not, he wasn't above calling me at whatever suburban squat I was living to brag about the Cowboys' latest conquest of the Giants. Watching sports, Kenny and Joan bickered like a sitcom couple. In fact, they argued often about other things, but were united by the elemental presence that brought them together: Rock and roll, as music, art, performance, rule book, design for living; as theology, as purpose, as molecular structure, the one meaningful aspect of existence. That all of these people are still together is proof of their devotion.

What I'm trying to do here is to take pages and pages of interview material and observations from the set and see how it plays as a multi-character narrative. All the quotes are accurate: They may be slightly out of order, but not, I hope, out of context. I am mostly on the sidelines. Sometimes I'll ask a question.

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The Barbusters, which feature Paul Harkins as Billy Tettore on drums, McKean, as Bu Montgomery, on bass, and Jett and Fox on guitars and vocals as Patti Rasnick and Joe Rasnick, are on the stage at the Euclid, doing a frightfully out of tune "Do-Wah-Diddy." Schrader tells Fox to spread his arms wider. In the trailer a little later, Jett is very tired.

Joan Jett: "I can be this tired and do a live show because the audience gets you excited. Here, there's no audience. It's focus––mental focus. This is a very different kind of work. You get all those emotions right up there to the surface [like before going onstage], then you wait for three hours. I do enjoy it. I'm having a real good time.

Michael McKean: She's a real live rock and roll person. It's what's running in her veins. I saw why Paul liked her very much. At first, they screen-tested some actresses, who sort of learned some rock and roll to do it. And Paul said no, it really has to be that person who has [rock and roll] in them to begin with.

Paul Schrader: The jury is in from the audience as far as actors pretending to be rock stars: They just don't like it. Whether it's Rebecca de Mornay or Demi Moore or Diane Ladd, rock audiences are very unforgiving. If it's not kosher, they ain't gonna eat it.

Michael J. Fox: Paul was adamant: If you don't buy the rock and roll stuff, it's not gonna work. You could have an Academy Award-winning performance in terms of acting, but you wouldn't buy it. So he knew he wanted a rock and roller.

HOW IS SHE DOING WITH THE ACTING PART?

Michael McKean: Really well. She worked with Sondra Lee, who is a wonderful acting teacher. She was my acting teacher for about half an hour at NYU. So Joan is no sweat.

Kenny Laguna: When a non-actor comes on the set, an actor can do one of two things: They can fuck the non-actor up, and make it impossible for them to compete. Or they can help the non-actor, and take a chance with themselves.

Michael J. Fox: With Joanie, it's give and take. I watch out for Joanie on the set, and she watches out for me in the singing.

Sondra Lee: Bonnie Timmerman, a very good casting person, called and said she wanted to set up an appointment for Joanie and I to meet. It wasn't about this project at all, it was another project. We worked a little while, and I was fascinated by this raw, baby Magnani.

Kenny Laguna: (to me): Do you know who Magnani is?

WR: Anna Magnani? [Exposive, earthy Italian actress who won the best actress Academy Award for the 1955 movie version of Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo, which also starred Burt Lancaster].

Sondra Lee: Anna Magnani was not an "actress": she was a thing. If she played a role in a prison, you couldn't just say she was the character in a prison. She was the bars, the cell . . . there's this well that comes from some ancient place, and that makes an actor. Observation, what you do with yourself, disguised as many selves, and many selves, disguised as you. The same energy and discipline she has as a musician was transformed, and that was a shock for everyone to see.

HOW ABOUT MICHAEL J. FOX?

Sondra Lee: I admire his seriousness. I think he is admirable, he has a specific kind of integrity. They're very different, but I think it is very supportive, Michael and Joan, they complement each other.

KENNY LAGUNA: JOANIE, HEAVY FIGHT TOMORROW. MIKE TYSON ON HBO.

(Mike Tyson and Joan Jett, a big boxing fan, became good friends.)

We're back in Jett's trailer. Jett has been talking about her refusal to do endorsements, product deals, TV commercials, even concerts in which the circumstances don't appeal to her hard-held integrity. The producer side of Laguna admires this. The manager side, the one who watched Jett turn down lucrative paydays without blinking, doesn't like this as much, though he respects it.

WR: YOU TURNED DOWN PLAYING THE US FESTIVAL (IN SAN BERNARDINO, CA) FOR WHICH YOU WERE OFFERED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS

Jett: That was a matter of, we had not played in L.A. for a year, and I didn't want  our concert, and all our people, to be in the middle of a hundred thousand people and see us do a short set. I wanted to do a long show, and that was the reason. Everyone was saying, 'but you're getting so much money' and I wanted to do our own concert. And people said, "you're talking about twenty-something thousand dollars a song," and that's when I said, "forget it."

Laguna enters Joan's trailer.

KENNY LAGUNA: (TO ME). You're with the third best rock act of all-time.

WR: WHO ARE THE FIRST TWO?

KL: Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones.

WR: I was sure The Who was going to be in your first two choices.

KL: Yeah, I guess they are better than Joan. Joan, you're in fourth place.

JOAN JETT: Thanks, Ken.

KL: And then comes Led Zeppelin.

JOAN JETT: Kenny, I mean it...

KL: Being the fourth best of all-time is...

JETT: (quieter, angrier). ...I mean it...So what were we talking about before he got us off the track?

WR: The reasons for not doing commercials, endorsements, or the US festival.

KL: The US Festival wasn't an endorsement.

Jett: I know, besides that.

KL: Just the ways to put us behind the eight-ball with money, right? [He is both serious and teasing, because I had seen this act before]. Turning down a quarter million dollars.

Jett: What was the one where they wanted to use "I Love Rock & Roll"?

KL: Chrysler was a heavy one. Chrysler wanted to back a long-form video that might cost $300,000 . . . They did research on her. Kids believe her. They don't buy her recordings, but they believe her. They said, Joanie, work a Chrysler, Plymouth, Dodge, into the videos. This was a year after we were super hot ["I Love Rock n Roll" spent seven weeks at No. 1 in 1982, longer than any other record that year], and still on MCA. All you'd  is see Joan stepping out of a Chrysler, or the band [the Blackhearts] riding in a Chrysler. [We said no.] These guys said we were assholes.

JETT: You always want to further your career, take it one step further, and that brings more fame, fame and pressure. The pressure to 'sell out' is amazing! If I said yes to everything people wanted me to do, I would have made millions, millions and millions of dollars. It's scary when you can make that money, they just need to use a piece of your song, you have to do absolutely nothing and make a fortune . . . They don't understand: It's not worth it to me. Maybe I am stupid, and making stupid decisions, maybe I should say 'yes' and be secure in my life. When it doesn't make me sick, then I'll do it. And I won't be ashamed, either, because I won't feel weird about it. The other ones, I felt weird about. I couldn't do it.

Light of Day was not a hit movie, nor was its Jett-performed title song, written by Bruce Springsteen as a favor to Schrader. She just kept rocking. A few nights ago Joan Jett and her current Blackhearts rocked the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, what the enthusiastic reviewer called "the Mother Church" of country music. No fiddles, banjos, or steel guitars were heard in Jett’s band. Earlier in the summer, Jett toured amphitheaters and arenas with Alanis Morissette. She still lives in Long Beach, NY, near the Laguna home in the New York suburbs. There are still Chrysler dealers, and Dodge and Jeep automobiles and SUVs and trucks, but the corporate name is now Stellantis North America. The parent company is headquartered in the Netherlands, as the result of the 2021 merger of the Italian owner of Fiat and the French parent company of Peugeot and Citroen. Joan Jett is not the subsidiary of anyone. I would say based on her choices, she and the Lagunas have lived a prosperous life, though not an ostenatiously wealthy one. She makes her living performing rock and roll. Joan Jett & the Blackhearts were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015.

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