SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2025 REVIEW! A legendary punk director makes his best documentary yet with The Secret Lives Of Bill Bartell, directed by the great David Markey. It is a portrait of Bill Bartell, who was better known as Pat Fear, punk rock guitarist for the band White Flag.
From their inception in 1982 in the lost city of Sunnymead, California, White Flag was the Mad Magazine parody of punk rock, with the members’ names being funny versions of the names of other punk musicians. Bill Bartell, with his perpetual ’70s mustache, did not fit the punk rock uniform. It did fit a cop uniform, which he would dress up in onstage at times. Bartell was an outcast among outcasts, which is very punk. He also seemed to know everybody and would drop names of weird foreign bands no one has ever heard of.
One person he knew was Kurt Cobain, who he gave a Daniel Johnston t-shirt of a frog saying “Hi, how are you” to. However, Bartell had a lot of secrets, to where even his best friends only knew a certain side of the rocker. Markey proceeds to explore these secret lives through interviews with many punk rock luminaries, such as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, King Buzzo of The Melvins, and Fat Mike of NOFX.
“So you think you know Punk?”
We also hear from Jeffrey McDonald and Steve McDonald of the punk band Red Kross and their experiences with White Flag. Also interviewed is Allison Anders, the director of Border Radio, the best Los Angeles punk scene movie ever made. Anders will school the viewer on all the different pop culture flashpoints that you never knew Bartell was behind.
Director Markey is already famous to old-school Film Threat readers, as his Desperate Teenage Love Dolls and Love Dolls Superstar were some of the earliest indie punk films to be distributed on VHS via ads in the magazine. Markey then broke big time with his indie doc 1991: The Year That Punk Broke, where he captured a no-name band named Nirvana’s European tour with Sonic Youth during the time the album Nevermind exploded over in the U.S.
He has directed countless music videos for punk bands of all budgets and also directed the definitive rock doc on The Circle Jerks with My Life As A Jerk. Even with a spiked leather pedigree like Markey’s, I was surprised by how high he hit it with his latest doc. The Secret Lives Of Bill Bartell is one of the most nuanced and mature treatments of the Los Angeles punk scene to date.
"…one of the most nuanced and mature treatments of the Los Angeles punk scene to date."
