IFP Doc Lab Sees the Hand of Fatima

In 1968, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones traveled to a small village in Morocco to find the birthplace of world music. By some counts, the legendary Master Musicians of Jajouka have played for 1300 years, distinguished by african oboes, lutes and bamboo flutes. Beat Generation hoi polloi like artist Brion Gysin, and authors Paul Bowles and Williiam Burroughs were fans. (Gysin introduced Jones to the group.) Before he died, Jones recorded Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka. Three years later, Robert Palmer, who was the first-ever rock critic for the New York Times, repeated the journey. (Before his death in 1997, Palmer was also a contributor to Rolling Stone and was considered the country’s pre-eminent music critic.)

Palmer’s relationship to the Jajouka players will be the subject of an upcoming film called The Hand of Fatima, directed and written by his daughter Augusta. I caught notice of this film because it was recently named one of ten winners of the Independent Film Project’s Documentary Lab. The program mentors filmmakers in a four day seminar and provides info on technical, creative, and post-production issues for films in the rough cut stage. The docs later screen at IFP’s Independent Film Week in September. I’m definitely catching this one. When cross-continental music docs cohere, they can be pretty unforgettable music and cultural works. (We still get requests to show our project where Dave Matthews and Trey Anastasio went to Sengal to play with Orchestra Baobab. It predated our VH1 Rock Doc franchise but helped give us confidence to proceed with a documentary series.)

To whet your appetite for The Hand of Fatima, here is a clip of the Master Musicians of Jajouka:

Listmania: 10 best concert films

I’m obviously still having some trouble with my incoming links because I missed this thoughtful post on Jim Harrington’s Concert Blog. He tries to establish a methodology for ranking concert films, a genre he says has “few keepers.” But I’m at odds with his restricting titles only to the big screen. Straight-to-DVD and Internet concert flicks should be worthy of consideration, because its awfully hard to amass a screen-worthy audience these days because of so many, such diverse musical acts (liberated, I should say, from the narrow bottleneck of big screens, radio and mass retail.) It’s a good thing and we should scour all distribution outlets for quality films. And just because there hasn’t been an amazing ones yet worthy of canonizing doesn’t mean they should be excluded.

Also, he says concert films may only document a single event. Yet he includes multi-night runs and festivals, but not tours. (This disqualifies Phish’s Bittersweet Motel, Neil Young’s Year of the Horse and the Stones’ Gimme Shelter.) For me, I think the criterion is whether a film is mostly performance or narrative.

Griping aside, here are Jim’s picks…nice to see that two of them (Awesome: I…Shot That! and Fade to Black) we acquired for TV to run under our VH1 Rock Docs banner.

1. Stop Making Sense (1984)
2. Awesome, I . . . Shot That! (2006)
3. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture (1973)
4. The Last Waltz (1978)
5. The Grateful Dead Movie (1977)
6. Rock the Bells (2007)
7. Monterey Pop (1968)
8. Fade to Black (2004)
9. The Song Remains the Same (1976)
10. Jimi Plays Berkeley (1971)

Lemmy Lemmy Lemmy

Billboard reports that Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister will be the subject of an upcoming music doc slated for 2009. It will celebrate the 62 year old front man as the epitome of hard rock with interviews from Slash, Dave Grohl, Mick Jones, and Alice Cooper among others. Nice quote here from co-director Greg Olliver:

Shooting Lemmy is like filming dangerous wildlife. He never does what you expect him to do, and he never does anything you want him to do. A lot of the coolest shots are shots we had to wait for four or five shows to go by before we could get them.

Sounds like any musician in a doc! The film has no distribution deal yet (does anyone think it would play well for VH1? Hmmm.) A teaser clip featuring Lemmy telling dirty jokes can found here and also at the Lemmy The Movie site (sorry no embeds yet.)

Trading Marty for Johnny

The Marley estate, like the Hendrix estate, are tough negotiators. (We know!) Very protective of the reggae founder’s legacy and music, all of which will likely make headaches for any filmmaker who wants to present a true honorific to Marley, not just a glorification. Maybe that’s why today’s Variety reports that Martin Scorses, citing scheduling reasons, has dropped out of filming Marley’s documentary. Taking over is Jonathan Demme, no slouch in the music doc department, having filmed The Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense and Neil Young’s Heart of Gold. (Per Variety, he’s at work at another Young concert film now, the Neil Young Trunk Show.) The Marley film has a target release date of February 6, 2010, the 65th anniversary of Marley’s birth.

Any New Yorkers can meet Demme next Tuesday night at the IFC’s Stranger Than Fiction doc series when Demme will do a Q&A after the showing of his 2003 film The Agronomist, an amazing, intimate, uplifting and sobering film about the founder of Haiti’s first independent radio station. Its notable for this blog since Wyclef Jean composed the score.

The Silverdocs Contenders for Best Music Doc

Didn’t know it until today but Silverdocs has its very own award for best music documentary. A great trend! This comes after the news that the festival named All Together Now as it opening feature.

None of these films are true premieres but it should be a pretty good line-up:

HI MY NAME IS RYAN: Phoenix alt-rocker balances music and Mormonism.
LA PALOMA : A Basque version of the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight, the film follows how an 1861 song is interpreted across the globe.
LIFE. SUPPORT. MUSIC: Guitarist Jason Crigler suffers massive brain injury. Watch this blog for more about this film!<
SONG SUNG BLUE /: This one has made the festival circuit rounds. A Neil Diamond impersonator and his wife try to keep their act going despite family trauma.
THROW DOWN YOUR HEART: Béla Fleck travels to Africa to play banjos with locals.
WILD COMBINATION : /All about the avant-garde singer-songwriter, cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell.
THE ENGLISH SURGEON: This one is actually not in the music doc competition, but it features music by Nick Cave.

Last year at Silverdocs, AJ Schnack received a Cinematic Vision Award for About a Son while the best music doc went to Nomadak, TX. Its a film featuring the Basque musical duo Oreka Tx who play the drum-like txalaparta. An excerpt is below. (What is it about all the Basques in music docs?)

Mini/micro/tiny docs (exemplified by Death Cab for Cutie)

Somewhere in the time space continuum longer than a music video or a You Tube clip but shorter than a feature length project or a TV hour is a potential reservoir of mini/micro/tiny docs. (Name suggestions welcome.) They will even exist in the music space, where the majority of offerings are either a video or an hour which seems to be the average length of the melange of interview/performance content stuck on the DVD side of enhanced CDs (known to the few out there who are still buying CDs.) The Net, natch, is going to open up a huge space for these types of intimate music docs that will have one thing to say and say it well. But I think the creative for these short takes is an idea yet to bloom.

Trying to lead the pack on this content (especially before the TV and Net fully breed into a device as user-friendly as the iPod) is CurrentTV. I love almost everything about Current – the endeavor, the graphics, the little bar that shows you how close the commercials are and the cool community features on the website (definitely worth a surf.) But what I don’t like are the programs on it! And that’s the problem so far with developing a lingua franca for short features. Hours and two hour slots draft an army of folks to create, get blessed and funded by folks whose jobs rely on making sure people enjoy (well, or watch) their programs. And its usually based on a few “holy crap, I’ve never seen that before” visuals, storylines, intimate moments that make it worthwhile to build an entire program or film around. Alternatively, the snack food clips of YouTube (and old music videos) are the empty calories of content, fun for a few moments, but with little lasting impact. I think the creative challenge in shorter music docs will be to raise it from the quickie, kneeslap ethos of the web and to create something so compelling people stop to watch.

Current’s new 25 minute Death Cab for Cutie doc is a good example of why it doesn’t work so well. The production values are great of course, sounding good, solid graphics, merging performance footage, interviews and rehearsals. But it really has nothing to offer. It’s the typical pre-album or tour release promotional package, with many generalized quotes: the band talking about how much they enjoy each other’s company, how good the music sounds and how they don’t like to stop takes in the studio. (Ugh, the studio. The dead spot of almost every music film project. If you crave such insight, maybe you’d also like to see a video of me typing this blog post! The making-of the creative is almost always a snoozer unless you’re an insatiable fan. For our VH1 Rock Docs series, where we want to fund unique films and filmmaker visions, our only cardinal rule is absolutely no “making of the record” projects! Yet we get pitched one almost every day!)

Back to Death Cab: Current’s flick is best when it leaves the studio and the stage in the later part of the program. Ben Gibbard gives a very short tour of downtown Seattle, where he reminisces about having to cut out of shows early when he was younger in order to catch the ferry home. The best part is bassist Nick Harmer packing at home for the band’s six month tour. He gives insights on what’s its like to separate from home for months on end, such as remembering to toss all his perishable food so he doesn’t return to a rotten refrigerator. Its a side of a musician’s life impossible to appreciate unless you are one.

But by all means, I hope Current (and maybe VH1 one day) can solve the riddle of how to make the economical format unforgettable. Here is the Death Cab mini/micro/tiny doc in its entirety.
from vodpod.com posted with vodpod

Silverdocs leads with a music doc

The very fine Silverdocs Festival has picked Adrian Wills’ All Together Now to open the fest in June. It played at HotDocs but this will be the U.S. premiere. I’ve been eager to see it and am curious if it would work as one of our VH1 Rock Docs.

The film is a classic behind the scenes story of how Cirque du Soleil created LOVE, the Vegas extravagaza based on the Beatles music. George Harrison had been friendly with Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte but passed away before it could be staged. Sir George Martin and his son Giles created the soundtrack in Abbey Road Studios by using original Beatles music from older versions and takes that didn’t appear on the studio albums in order to create something new. The doc features all the surviving players in the Beatles family, including Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison.

I’m sure it is a visual spectacle but I can’t help recalling the words of author Jeff Gordinier who wrote this unforgettable screed in his recent book X Saves the World:

…what the Cirque du Soleil people do to “Blackbird” ought to get them dragged into a courtroom in The Hague. It is a descreation. It is a violation of all that is holy and natural…some mad-professor guy dressed up in a white lab coat starts yapping out lyrics in a harsh Mitteleuropean accent that suggests a cross between Marilyn Manson in his Weimar-cabinet phase and the gestapo on Hogan’s Heroes. “Blackbud zinging in za DEAD of NIIGHT!”….Just at the moment when I think, This cannot get any worse, Dr. Gestapo slips on a blue rubber glove, leers at the crowd, and mimes the act of shoving a gloved finger up a blackbird’s rectum.

Um….OK…..The film’s trailer (below) doesn’t have this scene. But if a show can engender such an emotional chord, hopefully the making-of film can capture it.

UPDATE 5.22.08: I spoke to the film’s producer today and learned the Blackbird scene does NOT appear in the movie! So if the German version described above sounds alluring, you can only see it live in Vegas.

Musicians in the online wild?

As a general rule, I’ll refrain from blogging stories from places like the New York Times. I just want to believe its a world where the good stuff printed in the Times has already found an audience among readers of this blog. But this piece tells about an eight minute wildlife battle between buffaloes and lions that was initially rejected by the obvious cable networks. After it drew 30 million views on YouTube, it was turned into a long form documentary, perhaps the first long doc ever inspired by a YouTube clip.

Like other producers, I also troll YouTube looking for doc ideas but I find it doesn’t bear as much fruit as other news or magazine stories. Its hard to capture iconic moments on stolen video moments for celebs, mostly because their environments are so controlled. And sometimes, celebs command such awe that even cameramen get stymied. One favorite story is from Roger Daltrey who spoke at the premiere of our VH1 Rock Doc Amazing Journey. He recalled that when he and Pete Townshend got into their famous scrap, an entire film crew was already at their studio filming, but when the fight began, the cameramen drop their gear, mouths agape and nothing got filmed! (Maybe today’s shooters are much more desensitized to celebrity but I wonder in the heat of such a moment….)

And if there is an misstep or honest moment, it usually only plays well for 24 hours on TMZ. What’s interesting about the wildlife doc is that the eight minutes of footage needed backstory and context because the buffaloes and other animals fend the lions off from eating a young calf. I guess the animals do their dining in private since the Times quotes the safari guy as saying the rarity of the footage captured is akin to a meteorite hitting Earth. For a musical equivalent of a YouTube clip inspiring a doc, not only would the sound have to be captured perfectly (which is at odds with music and human action) but it would have to have such significance in music history that an entire story could envelop the highlight clip. Maybe when McCartney and Lennon called it quits or a short that records Axl Rose doing whatever he’s been doing for the past thirteen years instead of composing Chinese Democracy. Any ideas of what musical YouTube clips could inspire a whole doc? Post in the comments!

The Year(s) Sex Broke

It’s time to hype our own VH1 product. Fortunately, as with the majority of our Rock Docs, I believe its worth it! Sex: The Revolution is a four hour monster epic showing how sex changed (and was changed by) pop culture. The film mines the nation’s video archives to illustrate what the youth of yesterday was seeing (and learning and not learning) about sex. This includes the first sex education films ever shown in high schools to early sexploitation films to rare footage of NYC’s swinging mecca Plato’s Retreat.

I saw hours 2 and 3 the other night at our NYC premiere. I’m always impressed how tight Dana and Hart Perry’s make their docs. They are incisive, dropping thought bombs and key evolutionary information with each section, the types of films that make you feel smarter by watching. Even when the history is well known, they try to convey some forgotten texture or some important behind the scenes moments. This thoroughness is matched by their talent to make sure the docs move along and don’t drag, always a danger in most historical docs.

We dubbed this an official ROCK DOC since the accompanying soundtrack really underscores how music reflected the sexual urges of the eras. And while it was futile to try to encapsulate the pop history of sex in four hours, I wish there were a few more pieces specifically on how sexual freedoms changed music. One brief music section about disco is excerpted below. Tune in Monday May 12th and 10:00 p.m. and every night through Thursday. You can find more excerpts, including a great one about the Marilyn Chambers turned from the Ivory Snow girl into the nation’s most renowned adult star, at most video hosting sites, including here at DailyMotion.

Year of the Music Doc??

As this blog gathers steam, I’m still pushing out posts on stuff that happened in the past few months so forgive the tardiness. But I wanted to focus on a March article in Indiewire wondering if 2008 would be “the year of the music doc.”

Agnes Varnum (who also has the vital industry site Doc It Out) based her musings on the surfeit of films coming out: from biggies like Shine a Light, U2 3D, CSNY Deja Vu, and Anvil! The Story of Anvil (the Canadian band that was like a real life Spinal Tap that aired at Sundance and got the premiere slot at Hot Docs.)
Agnes cites a bunch of other films that premiered at March’s South By Southwest:
Agile, Mobile, Hostile: A Year With Andre Williams (about the 70something performer), Of all The Things (watch this blog for a full report on this film), Throw Down Your Heart (Bela Fleck learning more banjo techniques in Africa), Nerdcore Rising, Lou Reed’s Berlin (again, watch this space soon), Joy Division and Young@ Heart. Says former SXSW programm Matt Dentler, “Our screenings tend to feel like rock concerts sometimes, so it only makes sense that a film on the fun side or the performance side would have a great experience at the festival.” And many did! Enjoy a Sundance Channel report on the Anvil doc (also featured in the above picture.)