On the evening of Tuesday 4 September 2001, Warner Bros. premiered Rock Star in Westwood, Los Angeles. Mark Wahlberg arrived as Chris Cole, a Pittsburgh photocopier technician and tribute-band singer who is suddenly recruited to front the heavy-metal band he idolises. Jennifer Aniston played Emily, the girlfriend and manager who watches fame pull him away.
The story had a real starting point. In 1996 Tim "Ripper" Owens, a singer in a Judas Priest tribute act from Akron, Ohio, was hired to replace Rob Halford in the band itself; a New York Times profile of Owens set off a bidding war for the film rights. Judas Priest stepped back as the script moved away from their history, and the project, once titled Metal God, became a fictional band called Steel Dragon.
Brad Pitt had been the first actor attached to the lead. He left over creative differences long before Aniston was cast, and on premiere night he walked the carpet beside her instead. The couple had married thirteen months earlier; the Los Angeles Times noted that Pitt slipped into the theatre quickly, apparently to avoid drawing attention from his wife's evening.
Aniston's Friends co-star Lisa Kudrow arrived with her husband Michel Stern, while Wahlberg was photographed with Heidi Mark, who appears in the film. The arrivals also drew the musicians whose era the film revisits, among them Kiss's Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley and Poison's Bret Michaels.
Directed by Stephen Herek and written by John Stockwell, Rock Star opened across the United States three days later, on 7 September. Reviews were mixed and the box office fell well short of its budget, but the photographs from Westwood hold a particular moment: the Friends cast at the height of the show's run, Pitt and Aniston a year into their marriage, and Wahlberg completing his passage from pop performer to leading man.
