Les Bohem’s slightly self-serving biography
I was part of the great Los Angeles music scare of the early 1980s. My band, Gleaming Spires, had a cult-adjacent hit with our single, Are You Ready For the Sex Girls. (If you ever saw Revenge of the Nerds, you know). At the same time, I was holding down a day job as the bass player with the band, Sparks. (You can catch a glimpse of me in Edgar Wright’s terrific movie, The Sparks Brothers.) We were recording Angst In My Pants in Munich the entire time Sex Girls was in heavy rotation on Los Angeles radio. I was out of town for my fifteen minutes.
After this burgeoning career in rock and roll stopped burgeoning, I found a job writing screenplays about rock and roll musicians whose careers had stopped burgeoning. But no one makes movies about rock and roll musicians whose careers etc., and so I wrote A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5, The Horror Show and bits and pieces of several other memorable epics. Eventually Twenty Bucks, a movie that I wrote based on a 1935 script by my dad, Endre, (the apple didn’t fall – my parents were both writers) was made. The movie earned critical raves and several awards, including an Independent Spirit Award. My other screenwriting credits include Daylight, Dante’s Peak, The Alamo, Kid, Nowhere To Run, The Darkest Hour, Shut Eye, and the mini-series, Taken which I wrote and executive produced with Steven Spielberg (so you can now add “name-droppy” to “self-serving.”) and for which I received both Golden Globe and Writers Guild nominations and won an Emmy award, a Television Critics’ Award, and a Saturn Award.
I’ve had songs recorded by Emmylou Harris, Randy Travis, Freddy Fender, Steve Gillette, Johnette Napolitano, Alvin (of the Chipmunks) and the inimitable Misty Martinez. My first solo album, Moved to Duarte, was released a few years ago to lovely reviews and absolutely no sales or downloads. My Audible Original novel, Junk, narrated by John Waters, was a NYT notable and the best-selling Audible Original of 2019. The sort of sequel, Jive, is on Audible as well, and I’m working on a third piece, Justice, as we speak. Omnivore Records has just reissued all three of the Gleaming Spires albums, along with massive amounts of bonus material. Both of the Gleaming Spires fans are thrilled.
