P. David Ebersole’s documentary Hit So Hard, available on DVD this week, tells the unlikely story of Patty Schemel, drummer for Hole, close friend of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, and famously the first person Kurt wanted as the drummer for Nirvana (he settled for Dave Grohl, which worked out okay). Schemel’s story rips through sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, and all in a pretty intense way. It’s both hard-hitting and sobering (to use two phrases with many meanings within the film), but it’s also a very personal story. And it started, says Ebersole, with a gold box.
“Patty at one point literally had a gold box,” he says, “with over forty hours of never-before-seen footage that was all on Hi8 film. Patty was worried it would disintegrate, and so she brought over the box to my house so I could help her with it. Eventually we spent the summer of 2007 together poring over the footage, moving it to a more stable format, and as we were watching I’d be sitting with Patty talking about this amazing experience she had had reflected in this footage. The footage is shot in snippets so Patty would tell me what was going on in the clip and what was going on outside and around it. From those conversations I told her, ‘I really think you have something here,’ thinking she’d go and find someone to direct it.”
That person, though, turned out to be Ebersole himself. But he doesn’t see him self as some brilliant auteur: “We were just the lucky recipients of the beautiful gold box material,” he says with a smile.
Schemel’s recollections of the beginnings of the project are similar. “It began with all these Hi8 tapes that needed to be preserved,” she says. “They’re all analog, and we began to digitize them to preserve them because otherwise they would just disintegrate. And, as we were watching footage while it was being dubbed, I was telling him the stories behind all of it. I felt it was important for me to tell my story because of the process of what happened through Celebrity Skin, and being able to talk about my part in that. I love documentaries about my favorite musicians, so I always wanted to see that archival, backstage kind of footage. So, that’s what I wanted to put a lot of into this. And, we were lucky in the fact that we had all the footage first. We had all this great stuff to pick through and to craft the story with.”
Of course, having the ingredients of a great story is one thing. Telling it, in the documentary film format, is quite another. Ebersole was a bit daunted at first. “I had some past experiences with putting footage and interviews together,” he recalls, “but in essence I spent 20 years being a narrative filmmaker. Going into it, we weren’t even necessarily sure we’d know how, but we just sort of started. Our first interview was with Patty to see if we could capture it and to see if it would work. That interview is one of the centerpieces of the movie. That was supposed to be our testing reel, to get feedback. One of the greatest things about Patty is that she is so generous and so ready to deal with this part of her life and talk about it. So I would ask her about the early dog business, or the band, and everything would sort of lead into heavier subject matter.”
That openness that Ebersole found in Patty proved to be the key to telling her story,” he says. “As we got deeper into talking about her story, we realized that part of the reason she is a survivor is because she is able to look into her life and turn it into a story that is deep and funny at the same time. The other thing is that we came into the project as someone who just knew Patty as a friend. And inside all of these famous people who had become iconic in so many ways, they were all just a bunch of kids who were friends, who happened to play music, who set the world on fire. And the footage Patty had was so reflective of that. This was just a young family [Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love], a man and women in love, who were creative and made a baby and the world exploded on them. Patty was a good friend and was living at their house during that time. And when you’re backstage living at the house with everyone, it’s just the world as it is. So we got really engaged with this footage.”
Courtney Love is, of course, a big part of the story, and she can be notoriously difficult to work with. Ebersole’s experience, though, was a positive one. “She had all the rights to the music that allowed us to use the music in the film, so she was incredibly supportive and helpful,” he says. “The process of getting that force of nature into a room at a specific time for an interview was a fun journey, and it started when she lived in Los Angeles. We had scheduled an interview through—I don’t know how many assistants who we were talking to. And that day we just checked in for that confirmation, and her assistant said, ‘Oops. I think Courtney might be moving to New York tonight on a whim. She might get on a midnight flight. And it’s not the easiest to get her on a flight, so we’ll have to let you know in the morning.’ And then in the morning she was gone. It took us about a year to reschedule the interview. We came during fashion week, because we knew she wouldn’t leave and knew she would most likely be in public mode. We showed up at the Mercer Hotel at 7:30 p.m. for an 8:30 interview with Patty upstairs to sort of corral her and make it all happen. She finally came down at 11:30 p.m. and the interview lasted from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. Her last comment in the interview was, ‘You know, sometimes you have to just say fuck it and not care what everyone thinks.’”
Zooming in so close on such a personal time can wear on an interview subject, especially when there have been dark moments. Schemel’s life has been filled not only with professional drama, but personal tragedy and addiction issues as well. “At first I really didn’t want to be as personal,” she says. “It is such a big part of my story, but the downside is just as big a part as the upside. But to tell the story I had to talk about it all, because that’s me. My drug addiction and my recovery is a big part of me. The depths that I went to and also the heights: that’s all part of my story. There was really no glossing it over or covering any of it up. And, it’s part of the footage as well. Those were the interesting parts of other documentaries I’d watched, the struggles that people went through and seeing how survived or didn’t. The survival is important; that’s the story, how I got through.”
It’s also difficult, as a filmmaker, to ask a friend to relive moments like that. “We talked about it,” Ebersole says, “and sometimes she’d said, ‘That part is very difficult for me to look at.’ In fact, we’ve just gotten through doing the DVD extras, and we took a bunch of the not-used, raw, home-video footage from Patty’s stuff and put it on the DVD. To an outsider it looks like, ‘Oh, they’re having so much fun backstage,’ but she knows everything that those moments brought on backstage. You don’t want to push a friend into something that is difficult for them but the truth is we weren’t very close friends going into it. But [Schemel’s wife, producer] Christina [Soletti], Patty, [producer] Todd [Hughes] and I have become very close friends through the process of making the movie. I got to be a bit of the very curious new friend who got to ask the questions.”
Patty’s story goes through the dark valley of addiction, but it does end with a hopeful place. She’s been in successful recovery for years. “You come off the other side of it, and life is definitely amazing and better,” says Schemel. “But, like I mentioned in the film, you’re never really cured of the addiction. It’s a daily reprieve from whatever your addiction is. So, it’s just different now. I just have to make different sorts of choices. What becomes important is first me and staying clean, and then next is my family. It used to be that music was my number one priority over everything, and drums. But now, it falls way down on the list. Hanging on to my spot as the drummer in Hole, or drummer in any band, is definitely not the most important thing in my life at all. And so, priorities change and you grow up. And, you see what’s important.”
The sober life has changed her perspective on the creative life as well. “Well, playing and creating then was a lot of late nights,” she remembers. “And it was waiting around for Courtney a lot of the time. A lot of mind-altering drugs would get involved in that whole process. Nowadays, creating is more about something that’s challenging and exciting, like if I’m inspired by something—rather than having to show up at a rehearsal space because we have to write a song for a record. It’s a lot different. I do it because I like to do it. I work with kids at rock camp. Teaching girls how to play drums brings me back to the beginning of when I started to play and what I was excited about. It gets me grateful, and that has a lot to do with creating now, too, to get back to the beginning.”
There’s another reason Patty is excited about working with kids—she and Christina now have a girl of their own. That, too, has changed her lifestyle. “Well, it’s basically in bed at nine and a good book,” she says with a laugh. “It’s not really the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle; it’s completely the opposite. Like right now, I’m supposed to be doing interviews. And, she’s crying, and I have to go give her lunch. And, it’s like this balancing act of sort of this high-energy of touring with this high-energy of being a parent. It’s like that kind of chaos. It’s amazing, but it makes going away and traveling really difficult because I miss her when I’m not with her.”
It’s opened up a whole new avenue of communication for her with other friends who have kids too. “I run into them at other kids’ birthday parties. Like we all go to the same park, you know? I’ll see Louise Post from Veruca Salt and her daughter who’s a year older than mine. And, we’ll meet up at the park and talk about kids bands, kids music, and we’ll dissect songs and that kind of stuff. So, that’s kind of where things go these days. Any other kind of kids’ activity that has music, I always see other musician friends. “
From dealing with Courtney Love to dealing with a toddler, it’s been quite a journey. And in a way, one that’s come full circle.