Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The Dirt is one of the great rock ‘n’ roll sagas. Well, actually, “great” is probably too effusive a superlative to use in the context of Mötley Crüe. The band’s story is certainly notorious, crazed, epic, titillating and disgusting, overstuffed as it is with triumph, debauchery, tragedy, debauchery, debauchery, debauchery and even more debauchery. So it’s likely the most excessive rock ‘n’ roll saga ever, chronicled in the bestselling 2001 book co-authored by the band and Neil Strauss, a tell-all to end them all.
Now, after many years of development and Hollywood rigamarole, The Dirt is finally a movie that, by its very nature, needed to boil down a couple decades’ worth of over-the-top incidents to less than two hours of screen time. (It easily could have been a TV miniseries.) That means some wild stuff from the book didn’t make the cut — the following five things being the wildest:
Respect for Mick Mars
The most musically talented member of Mötley Crüe gets the least amount of screen time in The Dirt — sounds about right, doesn’t it? The movie paints the guitarist as the least-interesting band member, and actor Iwan Rheon doesn’t have much to do beyond playing an occasionally bemused misanthrope with a stiff back. Mick enjoys two significant moments: his intro sequence, which reveals the diagnosis of a painful and incurable disease that’s slowly causing his spine to fuse, and when he comes up with the name “Motley Crew.”
Vince Neil and Nikki Sixx’s struggles with death and addiction respectively are the movie’s emotional signposts, and Mick gets short shrift. Most of his story is left on the cutting room floor — his painkiller addiction, schizophrenia diagnosis and the time he nearly drowned himself. Yep, on the same day Vince drunkenly crashed his car, killing one person and critically injuring two others, a far-from-sober Mick walked into the Pacific Ocean, passed out, washed up on the beach and thought he was a ghost when he woke up. It says a lot that the Crüe’s cinematic saga is too unruly to include such a crazy moment. Poor Mick.
Pamela Anderson
To watch the movie is to believe Pamela Anderson doesn’t even exist. The screenplay takes some chronological liberties, a la Bohemian Rhapsody, which is the only explanation as to why Tommy Lee’s famous Baywatch actress/Playboy model wife isn’t mentioned, even late in the story. They met and married in 1995, their infamous sex tape leaked the same year and Lee spent six months in the clink in 1998 for a domestic assault conviction after he kicked Anderson while she was holding their son — and curiously, none of that is in the movie.
In fact, Lee is depicted as a mostly harmless maniac-dolt responsible for obnoxious mischief like harassing old people, puking on strippers and other such harmless, childlike shenanigans — compared to Nikki and Vince, he’s almost a saint! Then again, the movie does include a scene in which he clocks his girlfriend bloody on the tour bus once after she mouths off, which apparently is just foreshadowing for the Pamela Anderson saga in The Dirt II.
He “pretty much” raped her
In one of the book’s most uncomfortable moments, Nikki is having sex with a woman in a dark closet, stops, and, without her realizing what’s happening, has Tommy take over for him. Nikki later says, in so many words, that it was as if he had raped her. You won’t be shocked to learn that the incident isn’t in the movie. (Perhaps the four band members being co-producers had something to do with that.) Nikki recently wriggled out of some controversy by releasing a statement saying he doesn’t remember the incident, or the interviews with author Neil Strauss for the book, which occurred during his 2000 drug relapse.
"The Terror Twins"
Tommy and Nikki were so out of control, the movie could be one long montage of their countless acts of wanton destruction and depravity, a monument to their tireless assault on human dignity. So some of their hijinks stayed (being chased through a hotel by cops, chucking TVs out windows, etc.), while others had to go: Nikki nailing a dude’s earlobe to a table. Tommy’s cocaine addiction. Nikki urinating on Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick. Nikki ordering 150 strippers at one time while in Japan. The two of them terrorizing a train full of Japanese commuters by soaking them with saki. Oddly, their nickname, “The Terror Twins” — inspired by Aerosmith’s “Toxic Twins,” Steven Tyler and Joe Perry — is never uttered in the movie.
The punch-up that led to the breakup
In 1999, Vince and Tommy scuffled in the Las Vegas airport, prompting the drummer to quit the band for six years. Of course, each tells a different story: Tommy accuses Vince of being drunk and socking him in the face; Vince says he was provoked, and just reacted. Regardless, during the subsequent downtime is when “The Dirt” was published, so it only takes some slightly moronic conjecture to wonder if the book wouldn’t exist if Vince and Tommy hadn’t acted like juvenile idiots, and we wouldn’t be watching this mega-bonkers movie today. And a world without The Dirt sure would be a less interesting place to live, wouldn’t it?
