The Real-Life Tales Behind ‘Freaky Tales’

It was not your usual Wednesday night at the Grand Lake Theatre.

Outside Oakland’s movie palace last month, Hollywood actors made their way down the red carpet. Rap legends and punk OGs mingled beneath the marquee. Fans got on their tiptoes behind the line of TV cameras, jockeying for a glimpse of the film’s star, Pedro Pascal.

Premieres at the Grand Lake are always exciting, but they’re extra special when the movie is filmed and set in Oakland. Freaky Tales, from screenwriting and directing team Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (Half Nelson, Captain Marvel), is a revenge-fantasy flick that takes place in the year 1987. It’s filmed at Oakland landmarks, including the Oakland Coliseum, Giant Burger and the old Loard’s ice cream parlor on Coolidge and MacArthur. Marshawn Lynch and Rancid’s Tim Armstrong make cameos, as does Oakland rap icon Too Short, who narrates and helped produce the film. It opens in wide release Friday.

It’s full, in other words, of people and locations that carry name recognition for locals. But nationally, Oakland has never quite received proper credit for its contributions to American culture at large. As rapper Symba, who plays Too Short in the film, remarked on the red carpet, “People get their curations, their whole make-up, from things that we created here.”

Freaky Tales, then, is a movie about a town with a permanent underdog complex — and, fittingly, it’s told through different chapters, interconnected by Pascal’s performance as a hitman, that have underdogs as their heroes. A ragtag bunch of pacifist punk rockers beats up a crew of Nazi skinheads. Two teenage girls in a rap battle rip to shreds a rapper known for objectifying women. A basketball point guard comes alive for a mind-blowing fourth quarter in a historic comeback win.

The freakiest thing of all? These are events that really happened.

In many cases, thankfully, the events depicted in Freaky Tales involved people who are still around to witness what likely seemed impossible 38 years ago: a Hollywood movie with Oakland as its true star. Here are some of their real-life tales.

Punching Nazis: A punk love story

The first chapter of Freaky Tales follows young couple Tina (Ji-young Yoo) and Lucid (Jack Champion) as they navigate an increasing menace to their home-base punk collective of 924 Gilman: neo-Nazi skinheads, who barge into shows, knock people to the ground, assault girls and women and destroy band equipment.

After taking a vote led by security guard Greg (LeQuan Antonio Bennett), the punks decide to fight back. During an Operation Ivy show at the Berkeley club, the Nazi skinheads return, but this time they’re met by a wall of punks armed with bats, chains and trash can lids. Battered in the ensuing brawl, the defeated Nazis pile into their smashed and dented pickup truck and drive away to the El Cerrito hills.

Minus a few details, the chapter is remarkably true to real-life events. Fleck and Boden had a good roadmap: the fight is recalled at length in the East Bay punk documentary Turn It Around, directed by Gilman alum Corbett Redford, who came on as a technical advisor for the film.

“Greg” in the film is based on George Stephens, a.k.a. George Hated, who in 1987 lived in West Oakland, sang in the band The Hated and served as head of security at Gilman. In an interview, Stephens, now 57, recalled walking out to the sidewalk that night and seeing Nondo, his friend who was also working security, lying in the gutter outside the front door.

“And there were three Nazis standing over him, one holding a bat. So I grabbed the bat out of the guy’s hands and hit the three of them, got Nondo up, and got him inside,” Stephens said.

On any other night, that might have been the end of it. But just like in the film, the punks at Gilman who’d vowed to fight emptied into the street. Even Dave Dictor, the singer of “peace-punk” band MDC, who were headlining that night, joined in wielding an aluminum crutch.

“More people came out, and it turned into an absolute mess,” said Stephens.

Kamala Parks, who co-founded Gilman and drummed in several bands, remembered the nuanced deliberations about retaliating against Nazis among volunteers at the club, whose door rules stated “No Fighting.”

“A lot of folks who had previously taken a more pacifist standpoint had been convinced to fight back, mainly because skinhead violence had gotten more pronounced,” she said. (Parks herself had been punched in the face by a skinhead during a previous melee across town.)

By the end of the brawl outside Gilman, the punks had won. They even chased the Nazis across the street and smashed up their pickup truck before the skinheads sped away, fleeing.

“My heart was pounding right out of my chest,” Dave Dictor, MDC’s singer, recalled in his 2016 autobiography. “Right after the battle it was time to get on stage and sing, but I was too numb to be able to change gears to talk about it from the stage. As I remember, we just plowed through the set.”

Those mixed emotions were real, Parks said. “There was euphoria, but there’s dread, because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. You don’t know if they’re going to come back with a bigger group of people.”

Parks stayed on edge for a few weeks afterward. Amazingly, the Nazis never came back to Gilman.

As Stephens points out, though, they never went away for good.

“I mean, we live in America,” Stephens said. “It’s not surprising that the Proud Boys are back. That fringe has never really gone away in America.”

You want a bit of danger, step into my zone

“Ryan will tell you, he’s been pitching me a version of Freaky Tales for literally 15 years,” said Anna Boden, the film’s co-writer and co-director, in an interview. Her filmmaking partner, Ryan Fleck, grew up in Oakland; Boden in Massachusetts.

“And he grew up listening to Too Short’s music and I did not. And so I was listening to Too Short’s music for the first time as a grown woman. And it was, like, a very different experience for me than it was for Ryan,” she said of Short’s explicit and often misogynist subject material.

But one song stuck out for Boden. In “Don’t Fight the Feelin’” from the 1989 album Life Is… Too Short, Short trades verses with a female rap duo called Danger Zone, who insult his bankroll, poke fun at his bad breath and make repeated references to his size below the belt: “Do they call you Short because of your height or your width? / Diss me boy, I’ll hang your balls from a cliff.”

Boden knew she had found her entry to the story. “Hearing him allow himself to be taken down by these young women was kind of mind-blowing to me,” she said.

In the film, Barbie and Entice from Danger Zone are approached by Lenny G (the rapper Stunnaman02, in a role based on Short’s early rap partner Freddy B) to battle Short onstage at the Town’s hottest nightclub, Sweet Jimmie’s. Dubious of the proposition, but tired of being mistreated at their day job scooping ice cream, they accept.

The song unfolds in a thrilling scene, verse for verse, with actor and rapper Symba portraying Short’s hunched gait and coy taunting. (Symba asked Short for pointers, “and he sent me four videos, and was like, ‘Just embody this, and you’ll be alright,’” he said.) Danger Zone, meanwhile, keep coming back with heat, and win over the crowd. By the end, Short daps up the girls, conceding a draw, if not defeat.

In reality, “Don’t Fight the Feelin’” came together in the studio, not on stage.

Today, Tamra Goins is a talent agent in L.A. But in 1987, she was Entice — the 15-year-old East Oakland girl who linked up with her cousin, Bailey Brown, to form Danger Zone. They’d met Short through the female rap pioneer Kimmie Fresh years before recording “Don’t Fight the Feelin’,” she said in an interview. Danger Zone had even been signed to Short’s Dangerous Music label, which released their song “Jailbait,” a blunt warning to underage girls about predatory men.

When Short’s manager, Randy Austin, pitched the concept for “Don’t Fight the Feelin’” to be included on Short’s next full-length album, Goins was hesitant, just like her character in the movie.

“We’re terrified, right? Because one, we’re kids. Two, Short was known to call people head doctors. I think I was still a virgin! So we just were terrified of what he could possibly say,” Goins said.

Laying down the track at engineer Al Eaton’s One Little Indian studio in Richmond — essentially Eaton’s living room — Goins and Brown came for Short so viciously that the men present, like rappers Spice 1 and Rappin’ 4-Tay, kept laughing and ruining the take. “They’re running out of the house, cracking up, laughing,” said Goins. “We can’t even get through it!”

Short was similarly unprepared for Danger Zone’s verses.

“We made the song, I did my two verses. And it was supposed to be about an old dude pullin’ up in his car flirting with these young girls,” Short explained on Nick Cannon’s We Playin’ Spades podcast. “My verse was kinda nice. And they came back rippin’ me to shreds!”

Short was rattled, but “I went home and listened to it, and I was like, ‘Damn, this is kind of cool … let me go back and talk a lotta shit about them, and it’ll be a crazy song!’’

After redoing his verses to match Danger Zone’s venom and adding Rappin’ 4-Tay to the track, the song grew to a ridiculous length of over 8 minutes. Kimmie Fresh had released her own eight-minute diss track to Short, but this was men and women on the same song, a battle of the sexes on wax. Short knew it was gold.

Despite the song’s legendary status, Danger Zone never performed “Don’t Fight the Feelin’” live onstage with Short, as depicted in Freaky Tales. (Goins and Short have done the song without Brown a handful of times at cruises and sorority events.) Brown, who later traveled the world as a dancer for MC Hammer, currently lives in Ghana most of the year, scriptwriting and producing.

Now 53, Goins is proud of the song’s longevity among fans like Shaquille O’Neal, who lovingly goaded her into performing it on Sway’s Universe in 2011. But it comes with a dash of concern for her former 15-year-old self, rapping so brazenly amid the older pimps and players that inspired “Jailbait.”

“Sometimes I’ll look back at the lyrics and I go, ‘Oh!’” she said. “I’m a mom now. I’ll be like, ‘And why was your name Entice?’”

A warrior in more ways than one

Freaky Tales’ final chapter revolves around a story so well-known that it’s in the record books. In Game 4 of the 1987 NBA playoffs, the Warriors were down 3-0 against the Lakers and trailed 102-88 going into the fourth quarter.

Out of nowhere, Eric “Sleepy” Floyd roared into action, scoring 29 points in the fourth quarter to propel the Warriors to victory. Game announcer Greg Papa, baffled and slightly hoarse, was moved to exclaim, “Sleepy Floyd is Superman!”

It still stands today as the NBA postseason record for the most points scored by a player in a single quarter.

Outside the Grand Lake last month, Sleepy Floyd seemed surprised and humbled that his achievement is now part of a Hollywood film. Calling Freaky Tales “a love song to Oakland,” the point guard, now 65 and living in his home state of North Carolina, remarked that “just to have it centered around that game, truly I’m just blessed and honored to be a part of it.”

Floyd, who in the same matchup against the Lakers also set the record for the most points scored in a half of a playoff game with 39, is portrayed in Freaky Tales by Jay Ellis (Insecure, Top Gun: Maverick). Without giving away too much, Sleepy Floyd becomes the star of the film’s climax, diverging drastically from real-life events, complete with supernatural samurai skills.

“They made me look a lot cooler than I actually am,” Floyd said with a chuckle.

The Gilman punks’ beatdown, Danger Zone’s dominance, Sleepy Floyd’s fireworks — Freaky Tales makes clear to a nationwide moviegoing audience what Oakland has always known about itself: this is a place of amazing people, events and stories.

Asked about Oakland on the red carpet at the Grand Lake premiere, Pedro Pascal put it simply: “It’s the raddest city in the world.”

‘Freaky Tales’ opens in wide release on Friday, April 4.