SCREENING: NEW WAVE THEATRE w/ Peter Ivers’ biographer JOSH FRANK in person
May 14, 2009 
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Big Smash! Productions presents
NEW WAVE THEATRE
with Josh Frank, co-author of “In Heaven Everything is Fine: The Unsolved Life of Peter Ivers and the Lost History of New Wave Theatre” live in person to read from his book and present rare, restored episodes of NEW WAVE THEATRE – preceded by a live performance by SLATTERN!
Thursday May 14th at THE CYRK
254 Young St., Winnipeg, Canada
Doors: 7:00pm | Slattern 7:30pm | Intro and screening 8:00pm
Admission $8 in advance, $10 at the door. Includes one free drink and a LIMITED edition event poster by legendary punk/ underground artist GARY PANTER (designer of The Screamers logo and the production designer for Pee Wee’s Playhouse)!
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On March 3, 1983, Peter Ivers was found bludgeoned to death in his loft in downtown Los Angeles, ending a short-lived but essential pop cultural moment internet pharmacy propecia that has been all but lost to history. For the two years leading up to his murder, Ivers had hosted the underground best doses for propecia but increasingly popular LA-based music and sketch-comedy cable show New Wave Theatre.
The late ’70s through early ’80s was an explosive time for pop culture: Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon were leading a comedy renaissance, while punk rock and new wave were turning the music world on its head. New Wave Theatre brought together for the first time comedians-turned-Hollywood players like John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Harold Ramis with West Coast punks Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys, Fear, and others, thus transforming music and comedy best online generic levitra forever. The show was a jubilant, chaotic punk-experimental-comedy cabaret, and Ivers was its charismatic leader and muse. He was, in fact, the only person with the vision, the generosity of spirit, and the myriad of talented friends to bring together these two very different but equally influential worlds, and with his death the improbable and electric union of punk and comedy came to an end.
The magnetic, impishly brilliant Ivers was a respected musician and composer (in addition to several albums, he wrote the music for the centerpiece song of David Lynch’s cult classic Eraserhead) whose sublime and bizarre creativity was evident in everything he did. He was surrounded by people who loved him, many of them luminaries: his best friend from his Harvard days was Doug Kenney, founder of National Lampoon; he was also close to Harold Ramis and John Belushi. Upon his death, Ivers was just beginning to get mainstream recognition.
In Heaven Everything Is Fine is the first book to explore both the fertile, gritty scene that began and ended with New Wave Theatre and the life and death of its guiding spirit. Josh Frank, author of Fool the World: The Oral History of a Band Called Pixies, interviewed hundreds of people from Ivers’s circle, including Jello Biafra, Stockard Channing, and David Lynch, and we hear in their own words about Ivers and the marvelous world he inhabited. He also spoke with the Los Angeles Police Department about Ivers’s still-unsolved murder, and, as a result of his research, the Cold Case Unit has reopened the investigation. In Heaven Everything Is Fine is a riveting account of a gifted artist, his tragic death, and a little-known yet crucial chapter in American pop history.
A huge thanks to both Josh Frank and Gary Panter!!
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From Winnipeg’s alternative weekly UPTOWN:
Musician/cult figure Peter Ivers is being celebrated at The Cyrk with a screening of his seminal alt TV show New Wave Theatre and a reading by his biographer, Josh Frank
Josh Frank came across the curious case of musician, alternative TV host, and all-around cult figure Peter Ivers while doing research for his 2006 book, Fool the World: The Oral History of a Band Called Pixies.
“While writing the book, I researched the two or three covers the Pixies did, one of which was In Heaven, Everything is Fine (from Eraserhead),” Frank says. “The only information available about that song is that it’s written by both David Lynch and Peter Ivers. Now, that was intriguing to me. It was like a gaping hole in pop culture.’
Ivers, for the uninitiated, was a Harvard-educated underground musician with major label support. Early on, he mastered the harmonica, taught by such luminaries as Muddy Waters and Little Walter. Later in his life, Ivers hosted a TV show called New Wave Theatre, which unleashed the burgeoning L.A. punk scene of the 1980s into living rooms everywhere. Tragically, he was bludgeoned to death by an unknown assailant in 1983. He was just 37.
Ivers’ short yet accomplished life inspired Frank to pen a book about him, aptly titled In Heaven, Everything is Fine.
Ivers had many famous friends, all of whom relished the chance to talk about Ivers to author Frank. From Harold Ramis (co-writer of Ghostbusters) and Dan Aykroyd, to directors John Landis and Joe Dante (Gremlins), Ivers’ pals helped Frank better understand his subject.
“I got into contact with a very famous film producer, Lucy Fisher, who had been Ivers’ girlfriend back then. I wanted to talk to those who knew Peter the best and loved him the best, but to speak to people who worked and lived in the same era, just to get a sense of the time and place,” Frank says.
“This is the one project I worked on where not a single person said they wouldn’t talk to me about Peter. That’s quite amazing, you can’t write a story without having someone who’s angry at them, or embarrassed – there’s always a reason. That wasn’t the case here.”
The New Wave Theatre years encompassed a lot of Ivers’ creative output during the early 1980s, and his show introduced such groundbreaking punk acts as Fear, The Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys (Jello Biafra was a fan of Ivers’ solo albums) and The Blasters to the curious public.
“Peter is a prime example of being an everyman of the underground artist. We’re working on getting a documentary made about his life, because I feel that I’m not done on spreading the word about Ivers, his work and New Wave Theatre,” Frank says.
Frank is also quick to mention how the visual aid of having episodes to supplement his reading only helps in making new fans of Ivers.
“What really brought Peter to life, and made people come out and see him, is when we actually show episodes of New Wave Theatre. It put into perspective that he was a rock star. I mean, you read the book, and it does its job and I’m more proud of it than any other creative work, but people really got turned onto Peter when I show live recordings of him. They relate to him today in a way that I don’t think they really did back then,” Frank says.
“It’s both refreshing to know that there are still things to discover, but depressing that pop culture simplifies the timeline of history in order to make it more user-friendly. In doing so, we lose the more important moments that define us.”
About the author:
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer and programmer, founder of Spectacular Optical Publications and The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She has been a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine, founded the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival (1999-2005) in Vancouver, was the Festival Director of Monster Fest in Melbourne, Australia and was the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror (2005). She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (FAB Press, 2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012) and contributed to Destroy All Movies!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (Fantagraphics, 2011), Recovering 1940s Horror: Traces of a Lost Decade (Lexington, 2014) The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale (PS Press, 2017). She co-edited (with Paul Corupe) and published the anthology books KID POWER! (2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017). She edited the book Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (forthcoming), and is currently co-authoring (with Amy Searles) the book ‘Unhealthy and Aberrant’: Depictions of Horror Fandom in Film and Television and co-curating (with Clint Enns) an anthology book on the films of Robert Downey, Sr., as well as writing a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter. She was a producer on Mike Malloy’s Eurocrime: the Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s and Sean Hogan’s We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea and her first film as director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is due out from Severin Films in 2020.
