It’s really a tinsel-town movie. Everybody thinks it’s true — that’s the shame. —Jerry Allison, Cricket

Even though Buddy Holly never had a Number One single in America, his legacy is immeasurable. Holly and the Crickets established the precedent for a self-contained rock & roll band, that is, one that wrote its own material and had enough studio freedom to do what it felt, in the process bridging country and rock.

It is clear that the early Beatles were heavily influenced by him (Paul McCartney now owns the Holly song catalog) and that Bob Dylan’s phrasing owes him a great debt. The Rolling Stones’ first American release was Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” So it’s important to know just who Buddy Holly was.

No authoritative biography of Holly is currently available (John Goldrosen’s Buddy Holly: His Life and Music, published by Bowling Green University Popular Press in 1975, is out of print), and MCA’s reissues of Buddy Holly and the Crickets records are in disarray. As a result, The Buddy Holly Story now stands as the official version of his life, but the movie does not seem to be about the real Buddy Holly.

I sat with Ed Cohen, executive producer of The Buddy Holly Story, in his New York office, along with the film’s director, Steve Rash, and its producer, Freddy Bauer, and asked them about all the liberties their film had taken with the reality of Holly’s life, liberties that Holly’s family and friends are indignant about. As I pointed out inaccuracy after inaccuracy to Cohen, Bauer and Rash, they agreed, but cited “dramatic license” in defense of their film.

I asked Bauer about a statement he had made: “Whatever we put up there on the screen will be the truth.” “I’ll tell you what I meant by that,” he said. “Ask moviegoers who invented the telephone. They’ll tell you that Don Ameche did.” Don Ameche… . . . he’s right, there’s no way to refute the reality that is invented by a movie. But what The Buddy Holly Story suggests is that Holly invented himself at a roller-rink show in Lubbock, Texas, and then was perfected by a woman he married five and one-half months before his death at age twenty-two on February 3rd, 1959. What the movie portrays in between — and what it leave out — has been criticized by those who knew Holly and those who feel it misrepresents the historical role of one of America’s major rock & rollers.

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As Ed Cohen pointed out, you can only do so much with 114 minutes of film and $2 million — a very low film budget: Sgt. Pepper was up in the $12 million range. But a tight budget does not explain away the flaws in the story.

The three major complaints concern the portrayal of Holly’s family, the treatment of the Crickets and the omission of Norman Petty, Holly’s producer. There have been numerous attempts to adapt Holly’s life story to the screen. Three years ago, independent producers Freddy Bauer and Ed Cohen bought movie rights to Goldrosen’s book as source material. Meanwhile, MCA-Universal, with Petty’s help, considered a Holly movie-for-TV which never materialized. At the same time, 20-Century Fox actually did two weeks of filming of a script called Not Fade Away, from a story by Cricket Jerry Allison.

“The Buddy Holly Story isn’t a rock & roll movie,” said the film’s director Jerry Friedman. “Not Fade Away would’ve been a damn right-on movie about rock & roll.”

According to Friedman, Fox shut the project down because the script mainly concerned itself with a bus tour the Crickets did with black groups (historically, that’s accurate: bookers thought Holly and the Crickets were black). The script was called fiction but it’s very close to fact. “I sure wish Fox hadn’t backed down on it,” said Allison. “I think the first footage showed a lot of hassles with blacks — but we did get in a lot of hassles with the black guys on the bus.”

“I think they [the Crickets] were fools,” recalled Bauer. “I called Jerry Allison during Not Fade Away and I said, ‘You signed your rights exclusively to Fox?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry for you because you’ll regret it. If the situation changes, here are my phone numbers, please call me.’ I never heard from him.”

“Freddy Bauer did call me during the Not Fade Away deal,” said Allison, “and I said, ‘I’m not interested in your deal; I have this movie.’ That’s the last time he ever talked to me about it.

“I saw a thing,” he continued, “about how they portrayed two Crickets from the twelve Crickets and, hell, there weren’t twelve Crickets during Buddy’s career — there was Niki Sullivan, Joe B. Mauldin and I.” Allison is right. Rhythm guitarist Sullivan left the group in December 1957, but during most of Holly’s career, drummer Allison and bassist Mauldin were partners with Holly, cowriting many songs with him and performing on all the tours but the last one. They and Holly split up in October 1958, about three months before his death, but had planned to get back together. On Holly’s last tour, though, he recruited Waylon Jennings on bass, Tommy Allsup on guitar and drummer Charlie Bunch to tour with him — not a full orchestra with strings as the movie depicts.

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