This should have been the biggest week for Ministry in years—at least since the pioneering industrial band played four nights at Chicago’s House of Blues in May 2008 to end their final stateside tour. But thanks in part to a bout of bitter legal wrangling, Ministry front man and sole constant member Al Jourgensen is sitting the whole thing out.
“Why isn’t Al there?” Angie Jourgensen asks of the screening. “They never invited him. Isn’t that a little shady? . . . Don’t you think people would want to listen to Al talk about it?” The filmmakers admit that they didn’t invite Jourgensen, but insist that they couldn’t—they claim that Angie is trying to control access to him, and that it’s been months since they’ve gotten through. When they call him directly, they say, he doesn’t answer or call back.
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A March 28 letter signed by Jourgensen’s attorney Stephen F. Moeller to CIMMfest codirector Ilko Davidov claims that “exhibition of [Fix] has not been authorized by Mr. Jourgensen or by Ministry and that your unauthorized screening of the Picture may subject you to legal proceedings. . . . Demand is hereby made that you and CIMM immediately cease and desist from any further promotion or use of the Picture, and that you cancel the proposed showings of the Picture. . . . Your failure to comply with our demands . . . will very quickly result in our clients’ initiating legal action against CIMM in order to protect their legal rights.” An April 6 letter from Moeller adds the claim that the paperwork for the distribution deal is forged, and that Jourgensen did not sign it—a charge the filmmakers deny.
Born in Cuba in 1958 and raised in Chicago, Jourgensen is notorious for his addiction to heroin, for his explosive temper, and for his litigiousness: he’s even sued former collaborators, including Ministry bassist and producing partner Paul Barker, though the suit was dismissed in 2008.
Freel says friends warned him that if he got drawn into Jourgensen’s orbit, he’d wind up using again, or dead. “I thought it was aversion therapy, in the Clockwork Orange sense,” he says. “Do you want to hang out and look at the last ten years of your life and take stock and get grateful? The more I liked the guy, the more sad it made me.”
In 2008 Jourgensen appeared on Spread TV, an online talk show hosted by Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. When Navarro brought up Fix, Jourgensen said the film “was supposed to come out like six years ago, and I was like, I looked at it once and went, ‘No. No, there’s no way.’” That was just a preamble, though, to an explanation of how he’d made his peace with seeing it released. “It’s perfect timing,” he said. “I’ve been clean for six years. Ministry is now over. My touring days are over. . . . I could watch it and not cringe to the point of, like, curling into the fetal position and sucking your thumb and getting naked and yelling for mommy.”
Fix‘s long road to the theater hit its final stretch in 2009, when Freel finally raised the last of the film’s $220,000 budget from investors in Calgary. That year, Ed Bates of LA-based Gigantic Pictures, who’d helped produce the Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious, joined the Fix team as a postproduction and financing consultant. In early 2010 he signed a seven-year deal with the four partners—Barker, Freel, and Kinart, and allegedly Jourgensen—that gave Gigantic the right to distribute the film worldwide. “I thought because I had an agreement with them, and it’s a straightforward distribution agreement, that I was going to be able to go about my business,” Bates says.
Thu 4/14, 7:30 and 10:30 PM, Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, $15.
