HEY IS DEE DEE HOME -MOVIE

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Description:
"I've got my history on my arms!" is one of the keylines of that document by director Lech Kowalski. Dee Dee introduce his life, memories and opinions lot through his tattoos, like we know, Dee Dee was heavily tattooed. Lech profiles Dee Dee Ramone in this moving, and often chaotic, portrait of his life. Drawing on a potent mixture of vintage footage and few recent tributes, Kowalski paints a picture of an exuberant, friendly, yet hopelessly drug-addled individual, who was widely loved within the music community. You can find mostly from this release "Good Dee Dee", not "Bad Dee Dee", like Dee Dee liked to introduce his character also through his paintings.

Lech did longer interview with Dee Dee for his Born To Lose (The Last Rock'N'Roll Movie) document about Johnny Thunders. It was surprise that this document also features material mostly based for recordings of 1992, even mostly unseen. Thunders is main subject, Dee Dee tells his opinions since his first memories of New York Dolls. Feels that Johnny Thunders And The Heartbreakers stories are also more featured than Ramones stories... It was nice to hear Dee Dee telling how Stiv Bator called him and asked to come to Paris in late 1980's, Paris visit is been before pretty uncovered. Different drugs and scoring drugs are main subject. An essential purchase for any punk rock connoisseur, this moving testimony to one of the New York scenes most charismatic figures is a touching story that will have you laughing, crying, and screaming in equal measures. One confused gold piece is when Dee Dee perform acoustically short clip of I Got A Right To Love Her If I Wanna....

DVD contains also Johnny Thunders performing Chinese Rocks, lot behind-the-scene images, A3-sized poster (background features comic by Rick Tremble) and temporary "Dee Dee tattoos".

DVD release: October 21, 2003. This is distributed exclusively by MVD (Music Video Distributors, you can also order this from their site.).
Running time: 63 minutes.

Some screenings:
- 10th Raindance Film Festival was in London, UK and they screened Hey Is Dee Dee Home, the launch party was held at Teenage Schizoid with Speed Killers in Tuesday October 29, 2002 at 10PM.
- Tribeca film festival in NYC screened Hey Is Dee Dee Home on May 7 (midnight) and May 10, 2003 (11:30).
- Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village, NYC, screens/ screened it daily between September 3 - 16, 2003. It was shown with Kowalski's 29-minute short film Camera Gun.
- Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, USA. Sunday, September 21, 2003, 5:00PM and Thursday, September 25, 2003, 6:30PM.
- Tampere International Film Festival, Finland. Saturday March 6, 2004, 6:00PM (hall Plevna 6).
Lech Kowalski also arrived to Tampere Film Festival, originally he was taking part to discussion of subject "Documentmovie today" with some other people at Tyovaen Keskusmuseo Werstas, Auditorio Vaino, Vaino Linnan Aukio 8 in Friday March 5, 2004, 2:00PM. But he couldn't make it, and March 5 he did general press 6:00PM. Lech was really cool and we hanged together, and also I did interview with Lech to my books.
- Hey is Dee Dee Home will be shown twice at International Inde Cinema Festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina. First screening is in Wednesday April 14, 2004 at Cosmos cinema (address: Av. Corrientes 2046, Buenos Aires) 20.15 and second screening is in Sunday April 25, 2004 at Hoyts (Sala 8) cinema (address: Av. Corrientes 3247, Buenos Aires) 21.30.
Tickets can be purchased online at www.holacine.com and the festival's website is www.bafilmfest.com



Some reviews:
SEPTEMBER 3, 2003: NEW YORK POST BY MEGAN LEHMANN:
The documentary "Hey is Dee Dee Home?" is essentially an hour-long monologue, but this talking head is so engaging that you can't blame director Lech Kowalski's camera for not wanting to stray from the late Dee Dee Ramone's party-ravaged face. Occasionally, the lens dips to show off his battle-scarred torso, as the punk rock icon uses a road map of tattoos to take us on a trip back through time to the salad days of New York punk.
Kowalski ("D.O.A.") sat down with Dee Dee in 1992 to talk about the Ramones bassist's love-hate relationship with New York Dolls guitarist and Heartbreakers frontman Johnny Thunders for the film "Born to Lose."
Dee Dee opened up, and the interview turned into a wide-ranging reminiscence about the live-for-today hedonism of the "scene," including such escapades as stealing Joey Ramone's TV set and getting kicked out of Debbie Harry's apartment.
But mostly Dee Dee talks about heroin: scoring it, kicking it, being reeled back in.
It's funny and sad stuff. The middle-aged rocker comes across as childlike and eager-to-please even as he's remembering incidents such as forgetfully - or vengefully - leaving overdose victims to "turn blue in the bathtub."
Kowalski films Dee Dee - who died of an overdose on June 5, 2002 - sitting alone on a stool against a black background; punishing lighting illuminates each impish grin and regretful sigh as he delivers an extremely subjective oral history of New York punk.

SEPTEMBER 3, 2003, NEW YORK TIMES BY DAVE KEHR:
Since his 1980 documentary on the punk-rock movement, "D.O.A.," Lech Kowalski has been the foremost chronicler of the punk generation's romantic myths and harsh realities. The musicians he has focused on in his rough, video-based documentaries include the Sex Pistols, Billy Idol, Richard Hell and Johnny Thunders, the last one a spectacularly suicidal junkie-rocker whose 20-year journey to death by overdose was detailed in Mr. Kowalski's "Born to Lose: The Last Rock-and-Roll Movie" (1999).
Mr. Kowalski's new film, "Hey Is Dee Dee Home," which opens today at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, is a rueful, reflective companion piece to "Born to Lose." Its subject is one of Mr. Thunders's collaborators and fellow addicts, Dee Dee Ramone, who died of a drug overdose in June 2002. With songs like "I Wanna Be Sedated" (OBS, is written by Joey, not Dee Dee) and "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue" to his credit (he often wrote under his real name, Douglas Colvin), Mr. Ramone made no secret of his drug use, and he remains a leading example of that brand of self-destructive romantic revolt pioneered in the 19th century by the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud.
As extreme as his behavior and music often were, Mr. Ramone also seemed to be a sympathetic and reasonably self-aware person, at least as he is captured here in a sobered-up, 1991 interview that Mr. Kowalski unearthed and placed at the center of this film. Sitting before a fatalistically black background, wearing an artfully ripped T-shirt that exposes some of his extensive tattoos, Mr. Ramone tells of his dramatic ups and downs in a calm, clear voice - colored by a Queens accent - that invites immediate credibility. "I've got my history on my arms," Mr. Ramone says, looking both at the tattoos that document stages of his life and the collapsed veins that testify to his drug use.
Although Mr. Kowalski illustrates Mr. Ramone's stories with brief cutaways to vintage material, including some gorgeously crude Super 8 images of the early punk bands in performance, he generally allows his subject to speak for himself, without moralizing commentary.
The film's title is a line from one of Mr. Ramone's most frequently covered compositions, "Chinese Rocks," in which a visitor drops by to see if Dee Dee would like to come out and score. It is in discussing that song, which became a punk anthem, that Mr. Ramone is most regretful. "I feel like I became some kind of heroin guru," he says, and Mr. Kowalski allows the flicker of pain that crosses his ravaged face to convey all the remorse that the circumstances require.