Times Square

Canadian filmmaker Allan Moyle has a knack for helming quirky, rock-driven movies with big cult appeal. Others on his resume include “Empire Records,” the prophetic “Pump Up the Volume,” and the wonderfully irreverent “Weirdsville,” but “Times Square” nearly prevented all of those other great films from happening. The end result of his experience making the film led him to quit the movie business for a decade.

Although several people later sued claiming to have conceived the story themselves, it actually sprang from an unusual place: real life. Described by Moyle as “a little female thug,” an artistic young girl had lost a portion of her journal which “documented what it was like to be mentally ill” in the cushions of a couch which was found by one of Moyle’s associates. Moyle had had been working as a nurse’s aide in a mental institution, so he drew upon that experience, mixed in portions of the diary and churned out a story with Leanne Unger about a girl with an anxiety disorder called “She Got the Shakes.”

Moyle decided to get actor Tim Curry in on the ground floor. The pair had met in New York City a few years prior, and Curry had seen and liked Moyle’s previous film, “The Rubber Gun.” At the time, Curry was a relative unknown, having only appeared in a few television roles and oddball films like “The Shout,” and he was mostly focusing on an ill-fated music career which one only yield one minor hit, “I Do the Rock.” But his star was on the rise thanks to his iconic performance in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” a small cult film that was just beginning to seep into the public consciousness. “I decided to send the script directly to him rather than working through an agent,” said Moyle. “His response to the script was more than I could have hoped for. He said we're going to make this film and I'm going to help you. You can use my name. That was a big asset for raising both money and interest.” Unfortunately, Curry’s name ultimately proved to be a double-edged sword.

With Curry in place, Warner Bros. put in a bid to “develop” the film. This meant that Moyle could have potentially lost the rights to the story, the chance to direct, and it would be more than a year before the film could be made. Warner execs encouraged Moyle to join forces with screenwriting film critic Jacob Brackman. Moyle, Curry and Brackman met up for a meeting and it was soon decided to split the story’s one lead girl into two characters, “The Sleaze Sisters.”

Nicky Maratta became a troubled teen who had been abandoned and betrayed by everyone she ever loved; Pamela Pearl was the introverted daughter of a NYC politician (loosely modeled after Stanley Fink) who writes eloquent letters to eloquent local disc jockey Johnny LaGuardia. The two meet in an institution, run away, fall in love and become cult figures on the local radio station. That was the idea anyway, though something was ultimately lost in translation. Moyle acquired some seed money from investors and began holding auditions for the film in New York City as the Brackman script was being finalized.

Meanwhile, a young girl named Robin Johnson decided to sneak out of Brooklyn Tech High School for a smoke break with friends. It was there that she was approached by a skinny 20-something man who asked, “Are you sixteen?” “What do you want to know for?” Johnson replied. The man then passionately told her the story of “She Got the Shakes,” then implored her to audition for the film, saying she WAS the lead character. He handed her a business card with the production company’s phone number on the back and never saw him again. When Johnson later asked around, no one associated with the production knew who the man was.

After discussing it with her mother, Johnson was still reluctant but was pushed to audition by her best friend Cindi, who accompanied her. The audition process was not the normal one of going in to read scripts. Instead, girls were paired off, given a scenario and instructed to improvise a scene. As Johnson recalled, “I was supposed to be sixteen, having been picked up in Times Square after leaving reform school and taken for observation to a small room in a hospital, where there's a two-way mirror. Then I get teed off.” Johnson had no prior acting experience, but there was a raw energy that made them keep calling her back for more auditions. “I learned how to act,” Johnson said of the more than dozen follow-up auditions. Moyle was not present at her initial audition but he was immediately impressed with the youngster when he saw her, and ultimately championed her as the film’s star.

Enter successful entrepreneur Robert Stigwood, who surreptitiously acquired a copy of the script from an unknown source. Stigwood pursued Moyle to make the film but, having been familiar with the fantastical assault that is Stigwood’s recent flop “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Moyle was at first disinterested. "However, Stigwood spoke very intelligently about the project, said he didn't want to change the script, and gave us a lot of creative control," remarked Moyle. Since the other studios wanted him to eliminate the film’s innocuous but blatant lesbian subtext, Moyle figured gay producer Stigwood would let him include it in the final cut of the film. But, having no control over the final cut, Moyle was mistaken.

With Stigwood’s backing, casting the film suddenly became stunt-casting. Open auditions were held in most major North American cities in order to create a buzz about the film, and literally thousands of girls were seen to play the leads. In the end, both actresses were New York City residents. Trini Alvarado was already an established actress who had appeared on Broadway as well as in Robert Altman’s film “Rich Kids,” and Allan Moyle had become adamant that Robin Johnson was the film’s Nicky. “It’s a potential problem to give such a heavy role to a novice,” commented Moyle. “Robert Stigwood and I did not see eye-to-eye on that decision at all.” However, “Robin's turned out so terrific everyone has started to take credit for finding her, even Robert Stigwood who wasn't even involved in the project when we were doing the casting," Moyle commented in early 1980. Matter of fact, he literally liked her so much that he destroyed her career. But more on that later…

Cast members went through several weeks of rehearsals before filming commenced, during which time Johnson was not only given lessons in acting but also in acting like a rock star. She had a studio session with David Johansen of The New York Dolls in which they recorded the song “Flowers in the City” (which is credited but not heard in the final cut of the film). “I remember him coaching me and talking a lot about the attitude of rock and roll,” Johnson recalled. “I would go as far to the wall with this guy as I possibly could and he was like, ‘That’s where you start, now go farther!’” By the end of the day, Johansen was so impressed he remarked, “You could do this if you want to do this for a living.” Clearly the producers of her later film “Splitz” didn’t feel the same way, as they dubbed her singing voice. But anyway…