"Daisy Jones & the Six" upcoming Prime Series about a fictional Fleetwood Mac-like band (03/03/2023)

Hey, I'm 70 and the 70's were my favorite decade. I'll be happy to help them out. 100% with you on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

 

The “Hunger Games” actor looks older in the 70s than in the interview segments 20 years later. Meanwhile none of the band members look like they’ve aged, lol.

 

I noticed this, as well. I initially thought that the interview segments were set today, 40-something years later (it's never stated when the interviews take place, in the first episode, that I noticed). I was mystified. My wife, who read the book, let me know they're set in the 1990s. It still doesn't convincingly look like they aged a day, though. She also told me that one of the six isn't in the show - the character was dropped from the script - so the show doesn't really have a six with Daisy Jones, unless you include the photographer friend as an unofficial member. It should be Daisy Jones and the five.

 

MASSIVE lighting job by Bob Richardson and his crew, shooting in the San Fernando Valley in LA...



I think there was more digital VFX in the film than Tarantino likes to admit, but a lot of it was just going in and removing a building or replacing a sign (or removing the movie lights in this shot). All the cars were actual period cars, and they spent a ton of money on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood making it as authentic as it possibly could. The biggest expense to me was shooting on the real Hollywood Blvd. for a few days in the scenes going to and from Musso & Franks' Restaurant...



I believe Tarantino said, "we probably could have gotten by with just rebuilding a few blocks of Hollywood Blvd. from 1969 in another city and just shut the street down for a week, but we spent three times the money just doing it for real." I can't imagine the cost of changing every sign on every building for three blocks of downtown Hollywoo, as well as bringing in all the period cars, newspaper boxes, phone booths, costumes, and so on.

I think they gotta pick productions that are possible to do with the budget they have. Famously, when Damien Chazelle wrote the script to La La Land, his agent told him, "you know what? Don't hold back. If you need the first 6 minutes of the film to be hundreds of people getting out of their cars and dancing in the middle of an LA freeway, just do it. If we don't get the money, you can cut that sequence and figure out something else." But they got the money and they were able to shoot exactly what he wrote.

Look at the Love & Mercy biopic from 2014, where they managed to recreate both the 1960s and the 1980s for Brian Wilson's life... and yet the movie only cost $10 million (which is comparatively cheap). I thought it worked just fine. I was unaware of any digital effects going on -- it sure felt like Western Recorders and Brian Wilson's Malibu house to me.

 

They released another two episodes today. I was really looking forward to watching them but then some other show came on about some lady and her disco songs. Do they think anyone actually cares about this character? What is this all about? If this is their idea of a Donna Summer pastiche, then it’s a big failure. Please stick to the Daisy Jones & The Six storyline. That is the name of the show right?

 

I watched the first 2 or 3 episodes of Daisy Jones, and it's a mixed bag. Part of the fun (and problems) with watching a roman a clef like this is you're constantly trying to figure out who the character is based on: "the Jim Morrison-esque group leader? The Steve Nicks-like lead singer? The Christine McVie lookalike keyboard player? The black Bones Howe-like producer?" The music has some moments. The hit they're promoting has a Buckingham-Nicks vibe, which I think insiders will dig.

Technical pros and cons: I chuckled at the use of the legendary Sound City in North Hollywood, which really was a Mecca for '70s groups for a time. But I had problems with things like the microphones. Several times they performed in a garage or on stage with the ubiquitous Shure SM58's, which looked brand-spankin' new, as if they were bought from Guitar Center the day before. Trust me, no struggling rock group back then had brand-new mics -- they bought used, beat-to-hell mics with dented grills, covered with scratches, plus lots of bits of masking tape, and they often had 2 or 3 different models and brands: EVs, Shures, Radio Shack… it ran the gamut. In the studio, they had both Telefunken U47's and Neumann U87, but I would have expected to see pop filters on them. The studio headphones are all some unfamiliar fake brand, sorta/kinda like Koss Pro4AA’s (which I never saw in an LA studio in the 1970s). The phone booths shown on the streets looked brand-new and undamaged, which didn’t exist in any decade. The fake Super 8 shots are bogus because they’re showing negative film, which you couldn’t do in the 1970s. Only reversal (print) back then, Ektachrome or Kodachrome.

The vintage '70s LA locations weren't too bad. But the shots of the Troubadour nightclub in West Hollywood were carefully shot to avoid showing modern-day Santa Monica Blvd., which I thought was cheap. The Whisky A-Go-Go would have been a lot more crowded in 1970. On the plus side, the show gave me flashbacks to every apartment I ever lived in during the 1970s and 1980s, but a lot of those have basically remained the same ramshackle Spanish-style buildings they were then.

The "Fake 1990s interview" with the older group members was amusing, because they put fake scan lines in the picture, as if it was a converted NTSC video (subtle, but it's there). The show is grainy as hell, using superimposed 16mm grain cranked up to 11, to give it that "vintage" feel. The long-hair wigs used by some of the actors are laughably bad; it's amazing how they rarely get the hair right in these period recreations. And the '70s clothes were way too new and pristine, like it was just bought off the rack (which it probably was). The 1980s “Fake Merv Griffin” segments were particularly horrendous. The real Merv would be insulted to see a guy that fat and old playing the talkshow host, and the set was nowhere near what Merv had in that era. (Maybe I'm too close to it, because I worked for him for a year in the early 1980s.)

The story also begs credulity: a little girl in a wealthy LA family wouldn’t be singing along to hardcore R&B in 1961 (on headphones yet). It also seems like the writers couldn't make up their mind as to whether the story is about Fleetwood Mac, or is it stirring in a little bit of Doors conflict, or is it about the whole Eagles thing, or what? Group members come and go, the lead guitarist has to dry out in rehab, there's petty jealousies over money... standard-issue stuff. I guess for legal reasons they couldn't make it too close to Fleetwood Mac, but I laughed when Daisy came out on stage and started whirling around with her silk scarves. The record label execs and the producer display every cliche you've ever heard about the music business, and yet they haven't (yet) shown them signing autographs at Tower Records, which would be massively expensive to shoot.

Am I still gonna watch? Yeah, but I almost wish they'd have more melodrama and less beating around the bush. What's there is frankly kinda boring, and I feel like they could've told a better story in less time (but with a lot more money).

 

People here sure write lengthy dissertations about something they dislike …

 

I wrote one about something I liked ... with reservations!

 

The first two episodes are confusing and I kept on getting characters mixed up. It hits it's strides in ep 3 and ep 4 is pretty good. The Ooh La La singalong played really false as any song on a Faces album NOT sung by Rod wouldn't have got any airplay so 80% of the people in the room wouldn't have known it. Also, Daisy is supposed to be a music nerd but she complains that Ricky Nelson already had a song called Honeycomb while the song was actually by Jimmie Rogers.

 

Not sure there is Rod singing on Ooh La La.

 

He 'covered' it on hisBrit Pop tribute album (When We Were the New Boys)

 

I'm enjoying it enough, and the anachronisms (or inaccuracies) don't bother me. What does take me back a bit is my feeling that this show is pulling too much from earlier films and shows - Almost Famous, (particularly with the sing-a-long), but I'm also reminded of the latest version of A Star is Born with the two leads. A couple of the songs even remind me of "Shallow."

I think trying to find a one-to-one comparison with real rock groups is a bit of a dead end. The show is adapted from a novel, and I'm sure bits and pieces of different groups inspired the writer to create a composite. I don't know of any garage rock band that moved to L.A. and became part of the Laurel Canyon scene, but maybe I forgetting some group. Buffalo Springfield maybe come closest, but they were never a garage band, covering songs like "Have Love, Will Travel."

Daisy being 12-years old and listening to r&b doesn't bother me, either, because the show depicts her as a big fan of rhythm and blues. They're at least consistent - I'll buy it.

 

Eh, I jotted down notes on the phone as I watched and just did a cut-and-paste. Took me less than 5 minutes to put it together. I wrote for a slew of magazines in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, so it's nice to stay in practice and hit deadlines.

As far as my opinions go, I'd say this about my review...

My joke is, there's four major films out there that are fake Biopics about non-existent rock stars:

Almost Famous (the teenage kid writing reviews for Rolling Stone)
That Thing You Do (about a one-hit wonder group in 1964 that disintegrates)
God Give Me Strength (about a Carole King-esque songwriter who meets a Brian Wilson-like svengali who doesn't make it to reel 6)
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (kind of a combination of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and a half-dozen other country/rock guys who rise and fall and rise throughout the '60s and '70s)

What's interesting is that none of them made money, I suspect because it's hard enough to make a real rock biopic that becomes successful. But doubly hard to make a film about a fake band going through success and tragedy. How do you care about people who never lived, who had hits that never made the charts in our world?

Were you alive in 1961? I was, and I was Daisy's age. Trust me, this just didn't happen. It's way out of character and much too convenient, especially for a well-to-do white family in LA. I listened to Motown starting in 1964-1965, and my upper-middle-class parents absolutely hated it, with a lot of racist attitudes (which I suspect were common for my school chums in that era). I persisted and I'm still a fan... but I wouldn't have known obscure R&B artists in 1961, not when I was 9 or 10.

 

Having lived in Hawaii for 5 years - that definitely didn't look anything like Diamond Head! A lot more like Joshua Tree or wherever the Eagles shot their first album cover.

 

Many of the criticisms that people have posted about this show not being 100% accurate are due to the budget constraints of a TV series on a streaming platform. It's unrealistic to compare this to big studio movies with ten times the budget in terms of locations, cinematography, using period correct antique equipment, etc. IMO it gets much more right than it does wrong.

 

Vidiot's experience in 1961 has to be everyone's experience in 1961.

 

I laughed when they played the Diamond Head festival and they mentioned that the Dead were also playing. The handbill also listed the Grateful Dead as one of the bands, along with the year: 1975 - the one year out of their entire career that the Dead were on hiatus! I actually wondered if that was an in-joke.

 

Oh, not at all. But I was almost the same age as Daisy in 1961, and trust me, upper-scale white families were -- with rare exceptions -- not letting 8-year-old girls listen to "race records." But I could absolutely believe it could happen a decade later. I think it's a plot convenience to explain how a 20-something white girl could sing so well and be so soulful during the time of the show.

Note what I'm sharing here is just an opinion, just my life experience. Were you alive in 1961 and living in the U.S.? How old were you, and where were you living? I was about 7 in '61 and living in Tampa, and it was hard to even buy black-label records in that area unless you went to the predominantly low-income black/Cuban neighborhoods. There were one or two R&B radio stations on the AM dial (one only a daytimer), and I could believe somebody listening to R&B radio... but Daisy was clearly playing 45RPM records in the scene. I might believe it if she were 16, but not at 7 or 8.

I think they were trying to draw parallels to Janis Joplin, who grew up in Port Arthur, Texas, who did listen to blues albums in the late 1950s and sang blues and gospel songs during her time, when she was 17 or 18. But otherwise, a very dissimilar character. And not from a wealthy white family in LA.

I see a lot of visual cheapness and shortcuts. I can only tell you what I see, and nobody knows budget constraints better than me. Have you ever actually laid eyes on a line-item budget for a TV show? I have, and trust me, it's scary. The biggest shock for me was in finding out what the top star of the show makes, vs. the lowest-paid regular actor in the show; in one case, the two high-paid stars made $60,000 a week, and the lowest-paid was getting $4500 a week. That's a huge disparity, particularly when the low-paid people were featured in the show as much as the designated stars. And I also discovered there were a couple of producers on the show making less money than I did. Showbiz is a strange world.

 

I really enjoyed these latest two episodes. I don't think I'm a very critical TV watcher -- I enjoy shows for what they are. And to nitpick details just drives me batty -- but then I just ignore those posts honestly... this is a fictional story, so who really cares if the dates and details don't line up? Not me, not other casual TV watchers... and I agree with you @leemelone to me they seem to get more right than wrong...

 

disagree. 70's rock fans listened to albums and it was well known to any Faces fan....also it's the title of the album

 

I never heard it until the song was used in an ad for pensioners insurance this century. The Faces were huge here and radio never played it, even on album shows.

 

The constant bickering between Billy and Daisy in the latest episode is bordering on way too much for even a tv show. Seems they (the band) have barely started and it’s imploded. First Billy was a drunken mess, now it’s Daisy’s turn. Yikes!

 

I like Daisy. She drinks, takes drugs, speaks her mind no matter what and sleeps with lots of guys. What's not to like?

 

Sequels can be a bit random

 

Everything. She’s awful.