Interview with Kief Hillsbery, Who Is A Consultant On The Film ‘Teenage Wild Life’

Punk Globe: Many Thanks for doing the interview. We are both sick. Which sucks. Tell the readers about the film Teenage Wild Life 

Twenty-one years ago, I published a novel with Random House titled “What We Do Is Secret.” The title came from a song by the Germs. The first line of the book is “This is supposed to be about Darby Crash, but I don’t think it’s going to be.” The book actually takes place after Darby killed himself. It was well-received and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Fiction. So about two years later, a movie came out with the same title–you can’t copyright titles. It had NOTHING to do with my novel. It purported to be Darby’s life story. Let’s just say the less you knew about Darby and the Hollywood scene, the better the movie probably seemed, among the few people who actually saw it. Fast forward a couple of decades, director Mathew Mishory reads my novel, options it for a film, and first things first changes the title to Teenage Wildlife, after a Bowie song. He didn’t want any mix-up with the earlier film. I’d been dealing with that confusion for years. Even close friends of mine thought the What We Do Is Secret movie was based on my book. 

Teenage Wildlife is set at the moment in time when the original Hollywood scene is basically played out, and audiences for bands from the suburbs and beaches are taking over the venues and embracing a kind of uniformity in terms of what punk looks like and how punks are expected to behave. I saw this change firsthand. In 1976, after spending over a year in Nepal, I arrived in London on my way home. My adoptive mother was English, and I had cousins there around my age, in Islington. They were excited about some punk bands playing at a cinema just a few blocks from their flat, and invited me to tag along. I’d never even heard of punk rock. I’d been in Kathmandu, completely cut off from the world. So we walk over, and the next thing you know I’m jammed up close and personal with 300 other people doing the pogo dance to the take-no-prisoners sounds of the Buzzcocks, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols. I never looked back. Next morning I hacked my hair off, took the Tube down to the King’s Road, and swiped a shirt from SEX while my cousin chatted up the salesgirl–later famed in her own right as Jordan.

The trouble was, back in the States, I had a job lined up in Yosemite National Park, where everyone remained as clueless about punk as I was when I landed in London. I didn’t have a car, either. Then an ad for a Ramones gig at the Whisky lured me down to LA. I made some friends and stuck around to see the Damned a couple of weeks later. One night, I was standing outside Canter’s Deli, and this kid walked up and asked me if I had any drugs.

“Just a little weed,” I said. He made a disappointed face. He was looking for LSD. He seemed like your ordinary, slightly goofy California teen, with a couple of safety pins thrown in. He started to walk away, then turned and asked me where I got my shirt. He liked the Karl Marx patch. As soon as I said “London,” he took two steps closer, made serious eye contact—lovely blue eyes, he had—and said maybe we should smoke that joint. We moved into the shadow of a utility pole, and he introduced himself. “I’m Bobby Pyn,” he said. “P-Y-N.”

So that was how it started. I was only close to him for about three weeks. But I stayed in Hollywood for years, went to a lot of shows, did a lot of drugs, did what I had to do to get by. And the arc that turned Bobby Pyn into Darby Crash and ultimately took him where it took him struck me as a pretty good metaphor for what happened with the Hollywood punk scene overall, over time. 

Punk Globe: The mastermind behind the screenplay is Tony O Neil, formerly of The Brian Jonestown Massacre. How did you meet him? I knew Anton years ago, and I know Ricky really well now. He lives in San Francisco and was related to Ricky from The Push-Ups. He contacted me, trying to find him.

I met Tony through Matthew Mishory, director of Teenage Wildlife. I’d seen him perform with Brian Jonestown Massacre back in 1999. His book “Sick City” was one of my favorite Hollywood novels. And he’d worked with Cherie Currie on her memoir about life with the Runaways. Matthew thought Tony was a sure bet to get what I was writing about and translate all my pinballing wordplay into a narrative that would work on screen. And he was right.  

Punk Globe: My band, The White Trash Debutantes, played a show with them. They gave The Dwarves a run for their money

Punk Globe: Will the film deal with their famous feud with The Dandy Warhols?

No, I think that was pretty well covered in the documentary Dig! So well, in fact, it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. You know how the old porno theaters would advertise their films as XXX-rated? Dig! deserves a Triple D, for Debauchery, Destruction, and Decadence. It’s the classic gritty rock band flick. Everyone should see it. Tony gets into it with Anton at one point. Tony has an impressive musical resume. He played with Marc Almond while he was still in his teens. But he didn’t last long with Brian Jonestown Massacre. Got kicked out for excessive drug use, if you can believe it. With that band’s reputation, it’s like getting kicked out of the White House press office for lying. He’s been clean for a long time now. But getting back to the band feud, it would be anachronistic to include it in Teenage Wildlife, because everything takes place in 1981. 

Punk Globe: I am sure Tony and I have met in the past.

Punk Globe: Are you talking about incidents that happened to you?

Oh, yeah. The cliche is that first novels are always autobiographical. In my case, it was the second novel. It came about because a friend of mine who had a band back in the day was disappointed in “War Boy,” my first novel. There were all these great reviews, and it was published in Spanish, Catalan, and German as well as in the US and UK, and everybody else I knew was congratulating me. But he was like, “So when are you gonna write that book about the early LA punk scene?” Because he’d heard me wax more or less poetic about the Vex and Zero Zero Club as well as the Masque and the Whisky, lesser-known people like Black Randy and El Duce as well as, you know, Tomata and Darby. And he thought I could fictionalize my involvement in all that to avoid too much personal disclosure–not the queer stuff, I didn’t care about that, more the drug stuff, and the extent of it–and it would be wicked fun to read.

I was convinced, but I didn’t want to write a day-to-day narrative. So I made it all compressed, one night on the streets of Hollywood, written in the voice of one queer punk kid, on various drugs with his friends, a voice like a fever dream. I’d guess maybe 80% of what’s in the book really happened to me or people I knew. And as far as the personal disclosure went, it ended up that the biggest junkie in the book is the character based directly on me. Because by that point in the writing I was committed to honesty, and I knew that anybody from the scene who knew me and read it would recognize my character, and if I didn’t portray myself the way I was in real life it would undermine the credibility of the whole book. 

Punk Globe: You currently reside in Phoenix. Does Tony live there as well? 

I recently moved to Phoenix to get some health issues addressed at the Mayo Clinic. Tony lives in New Jersey these days with his wife and daughter. Though he can also be found in Paris and LA. Tony has some literary projects going as well as another film, last I heard.

Punk Globe: How far has the film gotten, or are you already showcasing it at film festivals

It’s still in pre-production. Incredibly in-depth research has been done into what the vatious venues and locations around Hollywood looked like in 1981, so they can be replicated accurately. Don Bolles has been brought on board as a music consultant. I understand that a shooting schedule is in the works. That’s all I’m allowed to reveal at the moment.

Punk Globe: Do you have any Internet addresses you would like to share with the readers?

Send donations, hate mail, and vintage gossip about Belinda Carlisle to kief@watchfor.rocks

Insta: @manimal_cracker

More on Teenage Wildlife: https://www.rubberringfilms.com/teenage

Punk Globe: Tell Us About what is happening for you and the film in 2026? Currently, the main goal is to recover.

Let’s hope the film is finished in 2026, if not yet ready for release. At the beginning of the year, I started writing a sequel to “What We Do Is Secret.” It takes some of the characters into the orbit of Jeffrey Lee Pierce, the genius behind Gun Club. An even wilder time is guaranteed for all.

Punk Globe: Describe yourself in three words 

Lover, Gambler, Survivor

Punk Globe: Any Last words for the Punk Globe readers?

Once upon another time, on a drizzly night outside the Mabuhay in 1978, Ginger Coyote handed me my first copy of a xeroxed zine called Punk Globe. I still have it, much the worse for weather and wear. It’s an honor and a pleasure, all these years later, to appear in the same publication, spiffed up but still punk as fuck. Especially because the interviewer is none other than Ms. Coyote herself. Neither of us drinks anymore, but if we did, I’d be hoisting a glass her way right now and saying as suavely as I know how, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”