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Remembering Times Square

Our writer recalls the cult classic teenage rock 'n' roll flick on its 30th birthday

By Ben Schulman
Published: October 19th, 2010 | 10:25am

If Pamela Pearl, the quiet, coddled half of the Sleez Sisters, were real, she’d be 43 years old today. Of course, Pamela and her fellow Sleez Sister, the iconic Riot-Grrrl archetype Nicky Marotta (who’d be 46 today, if she survived this long), are but characters from director Allan Moyle’s classic teenage empowerment epic Times Square. Thirty years removed from its release on October 17, 1980, the film—which chronicles the adventures of the younger, privileged Pearl and the older, wilder Marotta as they team up and break free from a New York neurological hospital, hole up in an abandoned warehouse by the East River, and terrorize/electrify all of NYC by tossing televisions from apartment building roofs and penning punk rock anthems broadcast by DJ Johnny LaGuardia (Tim Curry) as the Sleez Sisters—captures a physical place long gone. It's an ironic turn for the places in which the Sleez Sisters slummed it up, and most important, a lasting influence of DIY spirit.

It’s interesting to think of how Pamela Pearl may have turned out, or what she may think of her 13-year-old runaway self dancing at the Cleo Club and running around Times Square’s exhilarating, rabid streets. It would be even more interesting to hear what forty-something Pearl would think about those very streets in their present form. The subtext in Times Square is the tension between the forces that Pearl’s powerful father—a city commissioner campaigning to clean up the neighborhood with the slogan “Reclaim the Heart of the City”—represents, and the vibrancy of life that exists in the gritty, yet seductive and exciting area. At the film’s end, after the Sleez Sisters' successful guerilla concert on a Times Square rooftop, and as Marotta disappears into the adoring crowd below by jumping off the building (not unlike one of their tossed TV sets), Commissioner Pearl joins his daughter with a slight grin, seemingly seeing the life below in the streets for the first time. That liveliness is what DJ Johnny LaGuardia lives to give voice to, and why he gave the sisters a forum on his nightly radio show.

Watching the scene now, the irony almost feels heavy. Times Square’s heart is long gone. Pamela and Nicky’s co-opting of those blocks as their playground, driving thousands of other young girls into the neighborhood in the hopes of emulating them, comes across now like it was the first domino to fall that gentrified city spaces all across the country in the ensuing 20 years. By making it cool and hip to reclaim (insert former sketchy neighborhood into arty ‘hood into “safe” place in any big city here), the Sleez Sisters did more for Times Square than any top-down edict from the commissioner’s office could have done. While the history of the real Times Square certainly leans toward a more bureaucratic Commissioner Pearl-type of narrative, by making the heart of the city something engaging to youthful followers, the Sleez Sisters can be seen as bellwethers for turning formerly derelict city sects into hip ‘hoods everywhere. For cities, if not necessarily for the Times Square of '80s, the Sleez Sisters actually represented not a threat, but the best shot at redevelopment yet—although no one would have seen it that way at the time.

Most impressive about the film though is how the energy of Times Square has been picked up, translated, and parlayed into an amazingly expressive wealth of music and attitude, felt most strongly in the early-90s Riot Grrrl heyday. When Nicky Marotta raspily snarls “I’m sticking pins into your brain/I’m manslaughtering you with voodoo,” on the Sleez’s track “Your Daughter is One,” it’s easy to hear the same aggressive expression in the first line of Bikini Kill’s epic “Suck My Left One.” The single “She’s Amazing,” from another classic Riot Grrrl record from the same time period, Team Dresch’s Personal Best (Chainsaw), perfectly captures that same intensity that is found in Pammy and Nicky’s relationship. Record labels like Chainsaw, fanzines like Rollerderby, and even present-day events like the Renegade Craft Fair all have embodied the Sleez Sisters’ template of working on your own for the merit of having it be done. And it’s that DIY spirit that proves most enduring about the movie.

The soundtrack features music by the Pretenders, Talking Heads, XTC, The Ramones, Lou Reed, the Cure, Patti Smith group, and more.

Unlike the garbage-pail-punk, and tongue-in-cheek aesthetic of other 1980s female-centric punk underground films like Lovedolls Superstar, Times Square presented two strong, young female characters that refused the rules and made their own. When Nicky hooks Pamela up with a dancing gig at a topless bar, Pamela dances on her own terms, keeping on her clothes and becoming a main attraction in her own right. When Pamela realizes the Sleez Sisters’ days are coming to an end and it’s time to cement Nicky as a legend, she covertly arranges a secret show at midnight and gets the entire city to pay attention. While the Times Square of Times Square may only live on in films like Moyle’s, the strain of confidence and character that the Sleez Sisters encouraged still holds as much weight as ever, and can still serve as inspiration to thousands of kids looking to the hearts of their city. Hopefully, Pamela Pearl would say something similar today.

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