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The Wait: 6 Really Long-Gestating Music Films

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Miller Miller Miller & Sloan in We Don't Wanna Make You Dance, a music documentary that checks in with the funk/pop band at three junctures across 24 years.

The current big news in the movie biz (aside from The War Room dethroning Straight Outta Compton at the box office) is the saga of Amazing Grace. The Aretha Franklin concert doc, pieced together in recent years from footage shot by Sydney Pollack of her 1972 gospel gig-cum-recording session at an LA church, was set for a splashy September rollout at the A-list Telluride and Toronto film festivals. Those plans have been undone by Aretha and her attorneys, who contend the movie represents an unauthorized use of the Queen of Soul’s likeness and can’t come out without her say-so. A federal judge in Denver gave their argument enough credence to issue a restraining order Friday, quashing the Telluride premiere, and the Toronto fest, likely anticipating a similar legal stink, announced Tuesday that it was pulling the film from its schedule.

The case raises some rather interesting questions about celebrities’ rights to control the use of their name and image, not to mention opportunities for reporters and headline writers to name-check Aretha’s signature hit. (The Hollywood Reporter has both bases covered.) It’s also a reminder that music documentaries sometimes take a long, long, long time to get from shoot to screen. Some are hostages to legal fortune, some to actual fortune (or the lack of it). Sometimes it just takes a lot of years and a load of film stock (or bandwidth) for a musician’s or band’s story to crystallize in a filmmaker’s head. At 43 years and counting, Amazing Grace’s road is perhaps the longest and most winding, but the 5+1 films below are all admirable examples of perseverance in pursuing a compelling musical story, and all were worth the wait. Fittingly, given our brave new world of instant gratification, some are watchable on demand (or will be soon) from MusicFilmWeb.tv.

1. We Don’t Wanna Make You Dance (2013, dir. Lucy Kostelanetz)

Coming to MFWTV next week, We Don’t Wanna Make You Dance is a sort of pop variation on Michael Apted’s famed Up series, featuring Miller Miller Miller & Sloan, three teenage brothers and a high school chum who made a name in early ’80s New York with their energetic brand of white pop/funk. Filming in 1983, 1988, and 2007, Kostelanetz serves up a real-time portrait of how youthful dreams morph into adult realities, and how the resourcefulness, drive, and wit that fueled their early creative pursuits serve the erstwhile band members into middle age. We’ll have a Q&A with Kostelanetz and producer Jared Dubrino up next week.

2. Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields (2010, dirs. Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara)

O’Hara and Fix spent a decade documenting Merritt, the prodigious Magnetic Fields leader whose memorable melodies, lovelorn lyrics, and wry musical stylings have earned him plaudits as the Cole Porter of his day. Shooting long enough to witness the New York-steeped indie-pop god contemplate the once-unthinkable – a move to LA – the directors open a window on the personal and creative world of an ambitious but intensely private artist while celebrating one of the most engaging bodies of work in the contemporary American songbook. (Listen to a 2010 podcast interview with Kerthy Fix.)

3. The Wrecking Crew (2008, dir. Denny Tedesco)

Tedesco’s delightfully nostalgic paean to the eponymous assemblage of LA session musicians whose skill and versatility underpinned a huge chunk of the boomer-era hit parade (not to mention the fullest flowerings of Brian Wilson’s and Phil Spector’s genius) was 12 years in the filming and five more in scaling an enormous, expensive mountain of music licensing. It finally got theatrical and home releases this year, nearly two decades after Tedesco started it as a tribute to his dad, guitarist and Wrecking Crew member Tommy Tedesco. (Read an MFW interview with Denny Tedesco.)

4. Two-Headed Cow (2006, dir. Tony Gayton)

Two Headed Cow started in 1986 as a black-and-white road movie about Flat Duo Jets, the blazing psychobilly two-piece fronted by singer/guitarist Dexter Romweber. Financial and other travails halted the project, but 18 years later Gayton picked up Romweber’s trail on a series of solo shows in LA. Toggling between the two sets of footage and very different stages of Romweber’s life, this is a raw and candid examination of an iconic American artist’s rise and fall in the music industry as he struggles with the demons of psychosis, addiction, and violence.

5. Rye Coalition: The Story of the Hard Luck 5 (2014, dir. Jenni Matz)

Jenni Matz fell in with Jersey City post-hardcore heroes Rye Coalition in 1997 and started toting a videocam to their shows. And on their tours. And to LA when, after years of scrabbling and cult-building, they landed a major-label deal that almost instantly collapsed into one of the all-time indie rock cautionary tales. And back to Jersey City as they returned to bar-band obscurity and ultimately splitsville. More than a decade and a half after meeting Rye, Matz pulled together this rousing underdog portrait of an overlooked band. (Read an MFW interview with Jenni Matz.)

and … I Am Not a Rock Star (2012, dir. Bobbi Jo Hart)

Most long-gestating music films end up that way due to factors out of their makers’ control. As she explained to us a few years back, Bobbi Jo Hart always intended I Am Not a Rock Star to be a drawn-out affair, the better to document the pressure-cooker world of a classical music prodigy. Shot over eight years, the film intimately tracks Canadian pianist Marika Bournaki through her teens, patiently charting her musical and personal maturation from gawky phenom to self-assured virtuoso, and revealing the toll that nurturing a rare talent can take on a family. We also talked to Bournaki about the experience of reliving her youth on-screen.

 

 



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