Endless Calls for Fame
Directed by Olivia Serafini-Sauli
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hours, 23 minutes
Available On Digital & Cable VOD on March 14

by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

One of my favorite pop music critics and thinkers, Todd in the Shadows, has a common trope when discussing the one-hit-wonders of the late 1980s. The band in question is toiling after their high flight up the charts, trying to recapture that success. But all of a sudden, cut to a slick doubled guitar riff, a drum fill, and finally, the words onscreen that may as well serve as the act’s epitaph: “NIRVANA KILLED MY CAREER.” Another band, buried in a Seattle flannel shroud in 1991.

And indeed, Olivia Serafini-Sauli’s Endless Calls for Fame does lean heavily on the epochal shift before and after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Nevermind. But instead of using this transition to track the ends of bands, she uses it to show one band’s beginning, middle, and end. Put another way, what if Nirvana made some careers? Using a combination of retrospective talking-head interviews and the director’s own archival footage from the ‘80s and ‘90s, Endless Calls for Fame tracks the New York City music scene of the period when hardcore punk was ebbing as alternative and grunge were cresting. All of this is seen through the lens of the band New Rising Sons.

Serafini-Sauli was clearly good friends with the trio that made up the core of the New Rising Sons: lead singer and guitarist Garrett Klahn, drummer Drew Thomas, and lead guitarist Kevin McGinnis. (They were joined by a rotation of bass guitarists whose terms were about as short as Spinal Tap’s drummers, albeit presumably with less gruesome endings.) Coming from Buffalo, Katonah, and the Queens side of Floral Park, the three were coming out of other bands. As Thomas’s group Into Another and Klahn’s Texas is the Reason dissolved, and McGinnis’s ethereal 5412 group languished, they connected amid concerts by hardcore bands like Menswear and the Charlatans and proto-grunge acts like the Gorilla Biscuits. Very soon (as was the case for Texas is the Reason), big record labels came courting. The New Rising Sons became industry darlings looking for the next big thing in US alternative after Nirvana and Oasis, signing a deal with Virgin in the process. Just as quickly, though, they got dropped in a case of “Napster killed by career,” and the music industry shrinking in the wake of the Internet boom. Their debut album, recorded at the legendary Bearsville studio produced by Ted Niceley, was shelved, a lost artifact of rock history.

In all of this, Serafini-Sauli is present, but just outside the lens. Whether she was putting the camera in the face of her friends three decades ago or meeting up for interviews upon the New Rising Sons’ LP release of Set It Right, twenty years after its recording, she is always present. I was somewhat surprised by the more detached position, present only in glances and historic and present-day voiceover. After all, it’s her perspective as a fan and a friend that makes Endless Calls for Fame possible. Ultimately, I think the choice was the right one. By centering Klahn, McGinnis, and Thomas, Serafini-Sauli is able to put the full focus on the trio, their friendship, and their music. We see the New York of the New Rising Sons, as the city’s grit was slowly washed off between the hardcore era of CBGB and the Strokes’ release of Is This It. We get a sense of what it’s like to be young and in demand from an industry that would have the bottom fall out years later. Most valuably, we see the New Rising Sons’ love for each other, as palpable in the film as it is complicated. Their 2019 meeting to hear the new masters of Set It Right before its release on a small German label, and the contemporaneous solo interviews, seemed like a reunion of musical soulmates who came of age together. It belied a one-night-only revival in 2008 where Klahn and McGinnis clashed over artistic differences, as in the band’s dissolution at the end of the previous decade.

Ultimately, the music, and the deeper bonds, won out, and we see the New Rising Sons together again, just before Covid-19 quarantines began and scuppered any plans for a reunion tour. All that remains are the LP, a second compilation, this documentary, and each other. But Endless Calls for Fame serves as a worthy, sentimental document to mark this point in the careers of these three artists, and the scene that birthed them.

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