The music doesn't stop for Amanda Scheer Demme. Hollywood may not have a club at this very minute for the woman who most recently transformed nightlife here, but this brunette bad girl is unstoppable. Demme's never been a one-act show. And "nightclub impresario" has never been at the top of her CV, which leads off with music supervisor to some 30 films (among them Mean Girls, Blow and Garden State). Love her or loathe her, Demme hustles. She gets out late at night, navigating her giant, glossy, black Range Rover into dingy downtown to check out Brit guerrilla artist Banksy or a crop of young DJs at an overflowing Dublab party. Hours later, at dawn, she's back behind the wheel to take her two kids to school. Then it's head-on into three more feature films in the final stages, a TV show, a compilation album, a radio column, and four new nightclubs.
Perched on the edge of a stuffed club chair, Demme is describing the intricacies of finding the right song to soundtrack a full-nudity sex scene, one of a slew in the new HBO series she's music supervising. The show is about love and sex among three married couples. It's also on its second title and ready to be renamed yet again before its release next year. But what is certain is that a song chosen at the time of the scene's filming might not end up on the air. "So the actors can't get grinding too much to the beat or the song and scene won't match later if we have to switch out the music," she explains, gesticulating as she does with all four cylinders going.
It's perfectly characteristic, then, when she abruptly shifts gears to the compilation, the first in the "His & Her" line she's producing under the Thrive Records imprint with music fanatic and photographer George Augusto. The two met through Amy Sacco when the whole lot of them produced Usher's post-VMA party in Miami a couple years ago. ("Usher wanted live monkeys and fireworks, and that's what we gave him," Demme recalls.) On her new 17-track mix, out in November, Demme paired Daft Punk and Ryan Adams with Nina Simone and the Soft Lightes. The mix also takes the listener, willing or not, into Demme's mindset during a fast and furious year. At the newly renovated Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, she ushered in an era of heightened nightlife with the VIP lounge Teddy's and the poolside Tropicana Bar. The constant press, both good and very bad, served the hotel's owners exceptionally well. Celebrities flocked there. But grief followed for her employer and, most unceremoniously, for her. Hours following a mini-concert she pulled together with Prince, the owners fired her -- by e-mail and on Page Six. "Losing the place wasn't the hard part," Demme now reflects on the sordid period. "We all lose things. They were just things. At that moment, the hard part was being disappointed by people who I'd trusted," she admits. "I've been through worse. I've lost worse."
