Jessica Hopper: I think we were talking about big ideas about groupies…maybe wanting to know more about Sable [Starr] and Lori [Mattix]? I remember I was sitting in that hammock at that Airbnb in Silverlake…
Dylan Tupper Rupert: Oh yeah.
JH: And I said, “I think we gotta make something out of this.” And we were like, “Is it a book? Is this a TV series? Is this a documentary?” And I don’t ever think until we were really both a little bit more ensconced in the world of podcasts did we think, “It’s a podcast.” I mean, we baked this idea for solid couple of years: getting together materials, trying to talk about what we were finding in other histories, other big holes. And just thinking about: “what was really the best way to tell this story?” We eventually landed on [the idea that] it needs to be a podcast. We want to hear their voices. We want to hear them tell their story. And so I think the idea of moving beyond a book or something happened once we established, like, “Who are they now?”
DTR: I think a big reason we decided on the podcast treatment was, like Jessica said, hearing the stories. That’s what they have, that’s what they were able to take away from this time. They didn’t become rich and famous. Pamela [Des Barres] became a best-selling author, but she’s not living in luxury by any means. And so they came away with this richness of story that we could best tell over, I guess, seven-ish total hours of documentary versus trying to do a 90-minute feature doc or something. We figured out that we needed to have a lens and a scope, and that’s where the Sunset Strip parameters came in.
JH: We really wanted to make a thing that was really true to our shared vision of it. We really wanted something that centered them.
I think it was Lori Mattix who said in your podcast that she had been included in 37 rock books over the years. But I am hard-pressed to think of one that really centers her voice.
DTR: Ding, ding, ding. Just on the Lori Mattix tip, of all of these women, she has the most distinct path, in that our other characters hear the siren call of rock and roll and they’re going there to try and figure it out. But her narrative, the way she tells it, is different — like, she was swept up, she was chosen to be who she ended up becoming. And that narrative…takes a lot of her away. Like, “Okay, well, what did you want out of it?”
