Des Barres’ Adventures May Rock the Screen

It’s been nearly a year since Pamela Des Barres published “I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie,” a candid--and surprisingly appealing--memoir of her stint as rock’s groupie princess. (Her bedroom resume included Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger, Keith Moon, Don Johnson and--ahem--many more.)

The book inspired fan mail from the current generation of backstage-trippers (“they’d send photos of them with the guys in Bon Jovi,” she said) and a hate note (“from the head of the Snow White Fan Club who was mad because I said she was my idol”) but no legal threats from former conquests.

Now Des Barres has more good news about the book that’s due out this week in paperback. She’s sold the movie rights to the book to an unlikely producer--actress Ally Sheedy, who’s best known for her perky roles in “Short Circuit” and “Maid to Order” (though she played a brooding high schooler in “The Breakfast Club”).

“A friend gave me Pamela’s book to read and I just couldn’t put it down,” Sheedy explained. “I was so fascinated by the wild atmosphere of that time, probably because I missed it. I was born in 1962, so I was too young to be there for all that invention and creativity. But I thought it would make a great movie, especially since you get to see rock ‘n’ roll when it was so spontaneous--and before it became such a huge business.

Sheedy took Des Barres out to dinner--and the pair became fast friends. “I kept getting all this advice from lawyers and accountants about how to make the film,” she said. “But nothing ever happened. So when I heard that a studio was interested in it, I bought it myself. I’m learning about the whole process as we go along. But I really believe in the story, so I want to try and get it made.”

Des Barres will serve as creative consultant and stands to make a tidy profit. “If the budget’s over $5 million, I’ll be a very happy woman,” she said. “It could be a wonderful coming-of-age story, about girls growing up together--it certainly doesn’t have to have any explicit sex in it.”

Having survived a lengthy book tour, Des Barres anticipated the Big Question--just how much sex will the film have? And with which rock stars?

“The script can talk about my escapades with Mick or Jimmy, but we probably can’t use an actor to portray them,” she explained. “My agents tell me that it’ll be easier to portray the rock stars that are dead. I know it sounds crass, but if you’re dealing with guys who died from drug overdoses, it’s hard to claim any real defamation of character.

“We’d like to have actors portray Jim Morrison, Gram Parsons and, of course, Keith Moon, because he was such an incredibly charismatic--and enigmatic--figure.”

She laughed. “I know it sounds amazing, but Don Johnson wants to be in the movie! I wasn’t even thinking of having him in the picture. But when he heard about the film, he said, ‘So, who’s going to play me?’ Which I took as a signal that he didn’t mind. Wouldn’t you?”

Sheedy seemed a bit taken aback by the lowbrow tenor of the media’s questions so far. “I talked to a guy from Rolling Stone the other day and, geez. . . . All everyone wants to know is which rock stars are going to be in the movie and whether I’m gonna take my shirt off!”

Sheedy would like to see the film focus on the GTO’s (Girls Together Outrageously), a free-spirited all-girl performance group that was part of Frank Zappa’s late-’60s psychedlia pop-circus. With Des Barres (then known as Miss Pamela) as a founding member, the GTO’s functioned as a proto-feminist rock cheerleading society.

“It would be so boring to turn the book into a stupid, trashy People magazine sex trip,” Sheedy said. “I think the GTO’s are fascinating characters. They were sexually liberated girls who really had a lot of early feminist ideas, but they became trapped in the whole rock male-chauvinist society. So you feel exhilarated by the freedom they won, even if they eventually became prisoners of the same, old sex roles that they tried so hard to reject.”

As an actress, she’s intrigued by Des Barres. “The great thing about Pamela is that she’s impossible to pin down. She’s completely unpredictable--which has always been a great quality of rock ‘n’ roll and, of course, is what makes her part such a real challenge to play.”