THE JOURNEY

SHAKEDOWN has lived many lives: club, recording, film, exhibition, performance, broadcast, archive, and now the foundation of a new narrative feature.

2002

FILMING BEGINS

Leilah Weinraub meets Ronnie-Ron and begins photographing Shakedown in Los Angeles. She soon starts videotaping its shows, performers, and surrounding community.

What begins as documentation develops into a filmmaking process lasting more than fifteen years.

2011

THE FIRST KICKSTARTER

SHAKEDOWN receives early support through Kickstarter. The campaign helps carry the project forward as it continues evolving toward a feature film.

2017

WHITNEY BIENNIAL

A version of SHAKEDOWN appears in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

The project enters a museum while retaining the movement, sound, intimacy, and collective energy of the club from which it emerged.

2018

BERLINALE

The feature-length film premieres in Panorama at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival.

SHAKEDOWN begins circulating internationally through cinemas, festivals, museums, galleries, and cultural institutions.

Presentations include Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, MoMA PS1, Tate Modern, ICA London, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, True/False Film Fest, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Images Festival, Frameline, and other venues around the world.

2020

A NEW KIND OF RELEASE

In March 2020, SHAKEDOWN streams free on Pornhub, becoming the platform’s first non-pornographic feature film.

The release places the film directly inside the questions it has always carried: Who controls access? Where can images of sex, work, pleasure, and queer life circulate? Who is imagined as the proper audience for those images?

The film subsequently becomes available through the Criterion Channel and continues moving between streaming platforms, theaters, museums, and classrooms.

NOW

THE PROJECT CONTINUES

Grasshopper Film distributes SHAKEDOWN and brings the documentary to new audiences, platforms, colleges, and cultural institutions.

More than twenty years after filming began, the project is entering another form.

SHAKEDOWN: THE TRIAL returns to this world through narrative filmmaking—a courtroom comedy about performance, money, judgment, obscenity, freedom, and who controls the story.

The journey is not finished.