The Bling Ring

[MacGuffin]

Release date: June 14, 2013

Starring: Emma Watson, Leslie Mann, Taissa Farmiga, Erin Daniels

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Premise: Inspired by actual events, a group of fame-obsessed teenagers use the Internet to track celebrities' whereabouts in order to rob their homes.

[Robyn]

That's actually a pretty cool trailer.

But then again, Somewhere also had a cool trailer.

[wilder]

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer

[wilder]

All the songs in The Bling Ring

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ALEXIS NEIERS'S PRETTY WILD ROAD TO RECOVERY
By Mitchell Sunderland
via Vice

THE FORMER CELEBRITY THIEF AND DRUG ADDICT WHO INSPIRED SOFIA COPPOLA'S 'THE BLING RING'



In a hundred years, when historians are looking back at reality TV shows to understand what the fuck was going on in American culture during the nation's decline, there are going to be dozens, if not hundreds, of dissertations written on a short-lived series on the E! network called Pretty Wild.

Creator Dan Levy envisioned it as yet another show about a mother and her wild teenage daughters in star-studded, superficial Los Angeles—in this case, the mom was supposedly home-schooling the girls and basing her curriculum on the self-help film The Secret. But shortly after shooting the pilot episode, Alexis Neiers, one of those daughters, was arrested and charged with being part the "Bling Ring," a group of teens who allegedly robbed the homes of celebrities, including Orlando Bloom, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. To this day, Alexis denies that she was involved with these crimes, but the case and the ensuing publicity resulted in one of reality TV's funniest (and saddest) moments: a weeping, clearly high Alexis screaming, "Nancy Jo. This is Alexis Neiers calling!" while leaving several hysterical voicemails for Vanity Fair journalist Nancy Jo Sales, who wrote that Alexis wore "six-inch Louboutin heels to court" when she actually wore "four-inch, little brown BeBe shoes."

Alexis's fame—or infamy—has outlived that meme. Sales's article spawned a book titled The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World; Alexis was used as an example of millennial narcicism in Time's talked-about, much-maligned piece on the "Me Me Me Generation"; and Sofia Coppola has even made a movie out of her story, also called The Bling Ring—Emma Watson is playing a role based partially on Alexis, and the actress has described the character as "superficial, materialistic, vain, amoral. She's all of these things and I realized I hated her." The seedy saga sprawled far beyond the confines of the show, to the point where Brett Goodkin, the detective in charge of the Bling Ring investigation, is currently under investigation himself for working on Coppola's film while the case was still open.

Meanwhile, the real-life Alexis has matured in the two years since she served a month of her six-month sentence and subsequently got caught with heroin and sent to rehab. She's now married to a Canadian businessman she met at an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting, the mother of a baby girl, and a volunteer at her husband's sober living facility, Acadia Malibu. 

Alexis plans to use her experiences to speak at high schools, sponsor young recovering addicts, and write a memoir—she says her long-term plan is to become "the next Dr. Drew." Clearly, she's gone a long way from her past as a symbol of a youth culture that's supposed to be narcissistic, selfish, and obsessed with celebrities. I called Alexis via Skype to talk about being in the same prison as Lindsay Lohan, her admiration for Jenna Jameson, and saving the world.

VICE: America met you for the first time when the LAPD arrested you for allegedly burglarizing Orlando Bloom's mansion on the first episode. What was your life like before Pretty Wild and the Bling Ring?
Alexis Neiers: Pretty Wild came about in a bizarre way. My sister Tess and I just decided we wanted to start acting and modeling—not really to get famous, but to sustain my drug habit. We happened to do this low-budget film, and that's when we met one of the producers on the show, Dan Levy.

There's been a lot of fuss about your mother and how she was a real big fan of The Secret. What exactly were your religious beliefs?
It's not about The Secret. My family has studied [American spiritualist] Ernest Holmes and I was raised on his book, The Science of Mind. It's not something based on some hocus-pocus we pulled out of our asses. Growing up, we were ostracized by our little community in Oak Park, California, because we were weird and my mom was hippie-dippy. A lot of the kids weren't allowed to hang out with us, because we had crystals in our house and life-sized statues of Buddha. Fast-forward ten years, everyone is doing yoga and drinking their juice fucking cleanses and thinking they're super spiritual.

On the show, there's a moment when you ask your mother for an Adderall as you drive to court. Do you feel like your mom was trying her best, or do you think she enabled you?
I didn't get honest with a lot of the stuff that happened in my childhood till much later in life. I had suffered from severe sexual and physical abuse. I was molested from age three to six by a family member. My dad was an alcoholic and addict and suffered a lot of physical abuse. My parents divorced when I was very young. I had a lot of trauma as a child, but I kept it in. So I was weird. Someone finally made the recommendation to my mom—a single mom who was doing her best—to take me to a psychiatrist. And that psychiatrist put me on medications.

Were you high during the entire time you were shooting Pretty Wild?
Oh yeah. People think I was living with my family, but I was living at a Best Western on Franklin and Vine. I was smoking 20 80-mg oxys a day, I was doing tons of cocaine, I was panhandling for drugs. I had an over-$10,000-a-week drug habit. What you were seeing on TV was not what was really going on.

Was your mother aware of the severity of your issues?
She knew we were out of control, but there was nothing she could do. I remember one day she came over to my house, and the only thing I had were 30 rolls of tinfoil, and she said, "The only thing you have in your house is a box of cereal and foil." My response to her—and I remember this clearly—was, "I like to bake, you C-U-N-T."

I know you probably don't want to talk about this, but it's the giant elephant in the room: did you wear Louboutins to court?
No. You can see on an episode of Pretty Wild, I was certainly not wearing Louboutins. Did I own Louboutins? Yes. Did I walk into court wearing Louboutins? Never. Was I really wearing a little tweed skirt and four-inch BeBe kitten heels? Yes, I was.

You recently tweeted that detective Goodkin and Nancy Jo Sales are more obsessed with than you are. Could you elaborate on what you meant there?
I'll put it to you this way: when [Bling Ring member] Nick Prugo was originally arrested, Brett Goodkin interrogated him, and Brett spent seven minutes of that interview talking about me, my show, how hot we were. The second thing was the Dateline interviews [Goodkin did]. It started to get really weird, where he was playing this victorious cop or whatever. Then he goes and he starts consulting on this movie with Sofia Coppola. And then decides to play himself in the movie. He has pictures of himself with all these jewels on a table and pictures of him with Paris Hilton. And the only reason Nancy Jo is at all relevant—at all—is because I had a fucking meltdown on my television show. She claims that we're fame-obsessed teens. No, shame on you, Nancy! You have taken the pain you have caused me and you ran with it. Everything that they claim we are, they are. Everybody wants to be famous.

The first time you were in jail, you were in the same cellblock as Lindsay Lohan. What was that like?
I saw her very few times. I never spoke to her. It got blown up into this whole thing. I regret doing the interview where I spoke about it. It just wasn't really fair to her. I was still using. Of course she was crying in jail, she's in fucking jail. To Lindsay Lohan: I'm so sorry. I should have never done that.

After your second stint in jail you went to rehab. What was your mindset then?
I was in complete denial. I tried to drown myself in the toilet. I was in so much pain because of the detox from opiates and benzos. I was sitting in a cell with this girl; I was in protective custody, waiting to go to court. I asked her the one question you're never supposed to ask somebody when you're in jail: "What are you in here for?" She ended up telling me this horrific story about how her meth-addicted mom started giving her meth when she was 12. When you use meth for a number of years, you go into psychosis. You become schizophrenic, and that's what happened to this girl. She had been using for four years, she was 16 at the time, and one day her mom told her, "I need you to save me. And the only way I can be saved is if you go kill the family across the street and wait for the police to show up." She did—she slaughtered this family in full-on psychosis. One of them survived. The girl was about 22 when I talked to her. She had been fighting this case for five years. After I told her what I was going through, she said, "Remember, this time you can walk into that courtroom with God."

I had this moment of clarity. I was prepared to go in there and deny all the drugs and to say it was everybody else's fault. I didn't. I remember saying to the judge, "I'm a heroin addict. I'm 19 years old. I can't stop using heroin." I remember envisioning myself walking through that courtroom and having this presence of God on my shoulder, protecting me. There's a man, Greg Hannley, who was in the audience, and he said, "I'll take her to my rehab for a year on a scholarship." I was elated. There was my answer. I later asked him, "Why did you take me in for free?" He was like, "It's living amends for all the women that I hurt when I was using." What an incredible thing. He's still helping people today. He saved my life.

I know you believe in karma. Do you think this was karma's way of coming back to you and putting you on the right path?
I believe that, in some weird way, this whole thing with the Bling Ring, this whole reality show, is going to give me an opportunity to help people. Some of the people I really look up to now are people like Dr. Drew. Even though it's controversial what Dr. Drew does, he really is a good man and has a good heart. I would love to do something like that for youth. I would love to be that voice that says that it's OK to be sober.

What's your book going to be about?
It's a memoir. It's about my life. I do talk about the Bling Ring, but it's more about my childhood, addiction, my demons, and how I've overcome them. I remember reading Jenna Jameson's book a few years back, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. She talked about her rapes. I was just like, Wow. She really just got honest about that. And that must be so difficult. It gives you the feeling of, If she can do it, I can do it.

How does it feel to have survived everything that's happened to you in the past few years?
I'm living a life that's beyond my wildest dreams. The truth of the matter is that, for the majority of heroin addicts out there, we don't get sober. We don't get healthy. For a lot of victims of rape and molestation, we don't ever heal. This life that I'm living is absolutely—it blows my mind. It's not filled with tons of money or fame. I wouldn't give it up for anything. If I could just have my baby, my husband, our apartment and a car, I'd be happy. I feel really, really blessed.

[Neil]

For some weird reason I keep thinking, "yeah Harmony Korine already did this," yet at the same time I realize that's a dumb thought.

[wilder]

Sofia Coppola interviewed by Elvis Mitchell on The Treatment

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In Conversation | Lee Radziwill and Sofia Coppola, on Protecting Privacy
By Lee Radziwill
30 May 2013
via The New York Times




Sofia Coppola in her West Village apartment.



Sofia Coppola's own life is the very picture of elegant discretion. Who better to critique a celebrity-obsessed generation that overshares and hyperconsumes?

SOFIA COPPOLA'S NEW MOVIE, "The Bling Ring," tells the true story of a gaggle of San Fernando Valley teenagers so obsessed with the trappings of celebrity that they decided just to steal them. In 2008, this group set off on a nine-month spree in Hollywood, looting more than $3 million worth of jewelry and designer clothes from the homes of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and other TMZ-tracked starlets — in some cases breaking in by just walking through an unlocked front door. (They had Googled the addresses.) Unlike Coppola's earlier films, which approach the follies of youth with a sweet sense of melancholy, this one seems to raise a kind of parental alarm. Coppola's interest in this subject matter was sparked in part by having two young daughters, Romy, 6, and Cosima, 4. Here she chats with her friend Lee Radziwill about the current state of celebrity culture — and how this glittery world fascinates her as a filmmaker, and terrifies her as a mother.

Coppola: Lee, I'm so sorry you had to watch my loud and obnoxious film!

Radziwill: Not at all. I thought it was really interesting, and I was interested in why you chose to do this now.

Coppola: When I read the Vanity Fair article about these kids, it summed up everything that I think is declining in our culture. And it just doesn't feel like anyone is talking about it. Kids are inundated with reality TV and tabloid culture so much that this just seems normal. When I go to a concert, everyone is filming and photographing themselves and then posting the pictures right away. It is almost as if your experiences don't count unless you have an audience watching them. There are even videos of kids having their sweet-16 birthdays and they want a red-carpet V.I.P. theme. This movie was about an extreme version of this.

Radziwill: Does that fascinate you or frighten you or bewilder you?

Coppola: It frightens me, and it just seems like this trash culture is becoming acceptable as mainstream culture.

Radziwill: I find it sad that that's the way culture is going.

Coppola: Yeah, I guess I was hoping to have some kind of discussion about it in the hopes that we can try to improve things. I wanted at the beginning of the film for it to look as enticing as possible, so you could sort of understand why these kids were obsessed with that world and go along with the ride, so we're not just looking from a distance. I wanted you to try to experience it through their eyes. But I also wanted to kind of catch up with them, and then for people to start to have other feelings about it.

Radziwill: Imagine if your girls were as obsessed with celebrities and clothes! You would be in such despair.

Coppola: I know. I don't know if I would have been as interested in this if I didn't have daughters and know that they're growing up in this world. I think that's the way that it's affecting, because these are kids in the movie, they're so young and impressionable.





Sofia, age 3, with her father, Francis Ford Coppola, on the set of ''The Godfather, Part II.'' Right: her little director's chair on the set.



Radziwill: It was amazing to me that there were no alarms and that nobody was ever home.

Coppola: Yeah, they never turned on their alarm. The Bling Ring went to Paris Hilton's house like six times before she noticed. I think she has so much stuff that it took a while before she noticed that someone had broken into her house.

Radziwill: Did you actually film in Paris Hilton's house?

Coppola: Yes, she was really helpful to us.

Radziwill: Amazing that she let all that be photographed.

Coppola: I know, I was surprised. She wasn't there, but she let us into her closets and we were in her bathroom. I think it was also this idea of no privacy — no privacy, or mystery or anything.





The stars of Coppola's ''The Bling Ring'' (from left): Taissa Farmiga, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson, Katie Chang and Claire Julien.



Radziwill: It seems nothing is private anymore. That must particularly fascinate you, because you have such a sense of mystery about you. I find it so amazing that you've managed to keep your privacy and keep your mystique. And I think that's one of the things that has attracted such curiosity about you, because it's the antithesis of everybody else.

Coppola: To be private seems normal to me. In a magazine recently there was some personality talking about some private health issue, and I thought, Why not keep that private?

Radziwill: You keep yourself at a distance without being unfriendly. You have dignity, which is really rare in the entertainment world. Everybody wants to be out there until you're so sick of their faces and their magazine covers that you think, Oh no, not again. With you, at first I thought, Well, she's incredibly shy, but I understood it so well.

Coppola: I also appreciate that you are a fellow suspicious person. I remember you saying that you are suspicious of people, which I am. So it's always nice when you become friends with someone who sees things in a similar way.

Radziwill: What do you think made these kids that way? Was it their upbringing, their parents who didn't give a damn?

Coppola: I feel like they didn't have a strong family culture. So probably a combination of that and then being bombarded with those values. I try to be empathetic. You can't totally blame them, because they're young and they're being shown that this is what's valued in that society. But it's so important, the values of your family.

Radziwill: Now, your family is very close. I was wondering if your great serenity and calm came from your childhood?

Coppola: Oh, my mom is very calm and quiet, so I think I got that from her. Because my dad is passionate and loud.

Radziwill: But you had a very happy childhood?

Coppola: Yeah, it was always interesting and I really enjoyed that my parents always included us in their lives. So we got to be around all these interesting people and go on adventures. I mean there definitely were hard times, but —





Coppola in the living room of her New York apartment, where she lives with her husband, the French musician Thomas Mars, and their two children.



Radziwill: What was the hardest time?

Coppola: Well, as a teenager losing my brother. He died in a boat accident when I was 15 and he was 22, and we were very close. I have one brother now, Roman. I think our family is so close because we would go on location with my dad sometimes, and we weren't around neighborhood kids and so we had to hang out with each other and be friends with each other.

Radziwill: What location interested you the most?

Coppola: The Philippines for "Apocalypse Now" was the most exotic. I was really little. I was about Romy's age. We were there for more than a year. That was the most exotic and fun, but I always liked to go on location. When we moved for "The Outsiders" to Tulsa, Okla., my parents just put us in the local school. So I felt like I got to really have a sense of different kinds of people. My dad was always very charismatic and exciting and doing interesting things and having people over and blasting opera and cooking, and so I have good memories. We did not have a boring childhood.

Radziwill: Your choices in film are so interesting and so original. What attracts you to the totally different films that you've done?

Coppola: I feel like when I finish one, the next one is always a reaction to the one before. So after I did "Marie Antoinette," which was so decorative with so many characters, then I wanted to make "Somewhere," where it was just two characters, really simple. And then after that, which was so simple and slow paced, I felt in the mood to do this kind of gaudy, flashy, faster-paced one. But I feel like I'm usually just naturally drawn to something. I don't know what I want to do next, but I feel like doing something beautiful after this.

Radziwill: Would you like your children to go into film?

Coppola: After seeing "Cinderella," Romy keeps telling me that she wants to be on the Broadway stage. I'm hoping she'll outgrow that. We'll see. Romy is in the Girl Scouts and I was around this group of 6-year-olds, and we were talking about things and a few of them said, "I want to be famous." I thought, Where does that come from? I don't think we knew about that when we were 6 years old.

Radziwill: I've often thought — even though it's hard to give him even more credit than he has had — that Andy Warhol must have started a lot of 15 minutes of fame.

Coppola: I feel like now is the epitome of that idea.

Radziwill: It's such an amazing prediction from somebody who died a good 25 years ago. And it wasn't spot on then as far as I could tell. Maybe in Andy's circle, it was starting, but I think he was brilliant foreseeing this.

Coppola: I would be very curious what he would think now.

[Sleepless]

Thanks for taking the time to include the photos when posting that.

[Cloudy]

Just saw this. Not gonna lie, I was sort of pessimistic about it going in, which is stupid bc it's Sofia Coppola. that was fucking great.

[The Ultimate Badass]

Hi, Cloudy. Can you elaborate? The trailers look like shit to me.

[Cloudy]

The trailers look like shit, the story itself bored me on paper, but the way it was made was perfect. It did what I was hoping Spring Breakers could, but Spring Breakers left me empty handed. This portrayed fanaticism in a beyond truthful way. If I could relate it to another film it would be King of Comedy, it had that kind of feeling to it. It was hilarious, sad, and awkwardly real in a beautiful way. It was interesting to me, because what these girls were fantasizing about is one thing, but you could relate this same kind of behavior to any kind of fanaticism of an idol. But this film is not just about fanaticism, it's about how life is today in the places the masses are glued to most.

I honestly think Sofia Coppola showed a LOT of range with this one. And the film is so true to the characters that it didn't feel like a thesis paper on trash culture today. I felt like I knew all of these characters EXTREMELY well. I've seen all of this shit. It felt like an OLD OLD story that lives on through each generation with a new form. I've never seen a film depict the shit culture we're surrounded by with a delicate hand like this. SC balances her subjective/objective lens extremely carefully.

As you can tell, I'm not much of a reviewer, check this one out:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/06/sofia-coppolas-bling-ring.html


**disclaimer: As much as I'm raving about it, it's obvious that this one might not work it's charm on a majority of people. So be warned, I might be just one of those that it did. It's not a huge crowd-pleaser like other coppola's I think.

[jenkins]

The trailers look like shit, the story itself bored me on paper, but the way it was made was perfect. It did what I was hoping Spring Breakers could, but Spring Breakers left me empty handed. This portrayed fanaticism in a beyond truthful way. If I could relate it to another film it would be King of Comedy, it had that kind of feeling to it. It was hilarious, sad, and awkwardly truthful in a beautiful way. It was interesting to me, because what these girls were fantasizing about is one thing, but you could relate this same kind of behavior to any kind of fanaticism of an idol. But this film is not just about fanaticism, it's about how life is today in the places the masses are glued to most.

I honestly think Sofia Coppola showed a LOT of range with this one. And the film is so true to the characters that it didn't feel like a thesis paper on trash culture today. I felt like I knew all of these characters EXTREMELY well. I've seen all of this shit. It felt like an OLD OLD story that lives on through each generation with a new form. I've never seen a film depict the shit culture we're surrounded by with a delicate hand like this. SC balances her subjective/objective lens extremely carefully.

As you can tell, I'm not much of a reviewer, check this one out:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/06/sofia-coppolas-bling-ring.html

i liked your review!

all my friends are aware of how much i cherish this movie. few of my friends irl have liked this movie. they're quiet with me about the movie. i don't quiz them, i ask them what they thought, they stare at me, and then we talk about something else

the critical realm has been discordant as well. i don't read many critics -- what i mean is that i don't read any critics, and for this i read some but not many -- though i've encountered a vast array of critical confusion. the confusion and anger seems the foundation to the negative reviews. from what i've read, it seems like ao scott got it. i don't know what he's usually like, but this he got and he got it good

trash culture isn't a dictionary term. my exposure to it comes from early exploitation movies. i always think of it as a reference to subversive morality -- right now i'd have to explain the moral shifts of american cinema throughout its aging. i feel the need to clarify that i don't mean the same kind of trash culture as what's being described

overall this reply was to tell cloudy that i liked his review, and to say that about trash culture. i should click that new yorker link