“These are the tales, the freaky tales / These are the tales that I tell so well”
— Lyrics from “Freaky Tales” by Too Short
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck take the title of their new film, which is set in the East Bay, from Too Short’s rap song, “Freaky Tales.” The imaginative overlap essentially ends there. Too Short raps about his sexual proclivities and his many, many—real or fictional—conquests. While their four-chapter movie does include a rap-off battle of the sexes with some X-rated braggadocio, Freaky Tales remains otherwise consistently chaste. The filmmakers favored a Grand-Guignol display of stylized urban violence in the place of sensuality and romance. Nobody goes for a hike and a picnic in the redwoods.
Freaky Tales is a graphic novel brought to life in pulpy images that provide satisfying endings for hormonally charged adolescents and their adult counterparts. In a virtual interview, Boden said that separating the script into four distinct narratives “allowed us to tell these short, more propulsive, to-the-point stories.”
The violence, whether implied or on screen, includes a pregnant woman’s murder, the killing of an elderly woman and two members of her family, a battle royale between Gilman Street punk rockers and indie kids versus a gang of neo-Nazis, and a climactic revenge killing orgy presented as a dark knight-superhero fantasy.
The filmmakers mentioned the 2005 film Sin City as one source of inspiration. “When we were trying to pitch the story to financiers, we had a lot of imagery from different graphic novels,” Fleck recalled. “We wanted to both make it feel very grounded and authentic in a time and place, but also cue the audience in quite early that it wasn’t going to be totally based in reality.”
The first of the four “freaky tales” takes place in and around 924 Gilman St., the epicenter of punk-rock music in the East Bay. Boden said that in real life she’s anti-violence, but they based the Gilman Street tale on a true story. “We did talk to some of the OG Gilman crew who were actually involved in that [conflict], and they also talked to our actors about it,” Fleck said. Boden and Fleck also met with Corbett Redford, whose documentary Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk includes a segment about the fight.
“Gilman was a volunteer-run club that was a nonviolent place that is non-sexist, non-racist, where they could play their music and be their own community,” Boden said. “And that started getting overrun by Nazi boneheads.” Boden said that back in the 1980s the volunteers took a vote to see how they would deal with the boneheads. They decided to fight back. The decision to stand up and fight against hate was the compelling part of the story for the filmmakers.
By taking the portrayal of the fight to the extreme, by making it cartoonish, Boden said, “We’re giving our audience this catharsis of the underdogs kicking the bullies’ butts from the safety of the movie theater.”
Fleck grew up in the Bay Area but remembered being too shy to go to Gilman Street. “I was maybe too intimidated when I was in high school to go there,” he said. “As an adult, the more I got into punk rock music I learned about it later and had so much respect [for it].”
The Grand Lake Theatre, another familiar East Bay landmark, appears as a throughline linking the four tales. “Once we came up with these chapters, I found myself writing in the places that I knew,” Fleck said. “I grew up going to movies at the Grand Lake Theatre. I remember seeing Malcolm X there, and Austin Powers on Mother’s Day with my mom.” Additionally, Fleck included Loard’s Ice Cream, the Mormon Temple and Lake Merritt in the film. “All of these places needed to be represented in the movie,” he said.
Boden, who grew up in Massachusetts, has worked with Fleck for over 20 years. He told her a lot about the Bay Area and they visited it together. “Ryan talked about it as a very diverse place, socially conscious, a place where he forged his identity,” she said. When they were in town, Fleck’s father drove Boden around to show her the street art. “But the culture, the music, and of course his sports fandom—I always knew that the Bay Area was a place that he was very proud of being from, and that he had a lot of love for.”
‘Freaky Tales’ opens Thursday, April 3 at the Grand Lake Theater.
