Emmy and Festival Nods for NY77!

A pair of good news items regarding our 2007 Vh1 Rock Doc NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell. We learned it has been nominated for two Emmy Awards! One for Outstanding Arts and Cultural documentary as well as a nomination in the crafts category for graphics! It’s a huge honor to get recognized and equally gratifying that it comes right after our victory last year in this category for the VH1 Rock Doc: DMC: My Adoption Journey. Tons of thanks to the team who helped make it happen: Henry Corra, Jeremy Amar, Wyeth Hansen and Nanette Burstein, who has had a triplely amazing month: new baby, her new American Teen doc opening to great reviews nationwide, and this nomination.

Earlier, we also got an unexpected ask for NY77 to appear in the Barcelona In-Edit Music Documentary Festival. I was never aware of this doc fest before our invitation but now I hold it in high esteem (of course.) There is a definitely an opening for a music documentary festival in the U.S. Both South by Southwest and Silverdocs devote programming categories to music docs and there has been small festivals in Canada and Australia. But no main U.S. music doc-only festivals. It’s a side project we are pursuing so watch this space! (Yes, this is a naked attempt to get to travel to Barcelona for a fact finding mission about running music doc festivals.)

Enjoy an except from the Emmy-nominated NY77 below!

Will Write Songs for Charity

Character driven docs (aka Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock) have tended to dominate the doc box office, usually because they’re amazingly funny. But hundreds of these docs must get produced a year and fall flat if the magic doesn’t last for 90 minutes. I caught notice that this doc that won awards at a few smaller festivals and I’m reaching out to the filmmakers to screen a copy. It’s about a group of pals who try to convince a group of famous artists like Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart and others to record songs written by their buddy, an unknown singer-songwriter. If this has some good pathos with a striving, unfulfilled buddy and some great exchanges with the artists, it could be feature worthy. Or could it be another road movie to nowhere? I’m intrigued. See what you think of the clip below. LA readers can check this out a screening today at 3:30 PM at the House of Blues in Hollywood and at 6:30 PM, August 1st, at the Regency Theater in West Hollywood.

Recorded Music As Important as Motor Car, says Martin

In a recent Billboard Q&A with Beatles impresario Sir George Martin, I learned about perhaps the longest music doc ever created! (As a journalist, I’m all about insignificant records and milestones.) Currently in production for PBS, On Record: The Soundtrack of Our Lives recounts the history of recorded music and its impact on society. It will feature archival performances and interviews with artists from all genres, including Frank Sinatra, Loretta Lynn and Jay-Z. It should be finished by fall of 2010. Five hours may be a bit obsessive but the story of how recorded music changed how the world perceives, appreciates and consumes music is a great topic. I’ll let Martin hype up the project in his own words:

Recording started at the beginning of the 20th century, and here we are in the 21st century. I started recording in 1950, which was exactly halfway through. I was very interested in the background and the history of how sound recording developed. It was a profound business — that suddenly, for the first time, people could hear other people on record. It’s difficult for us to comprehend what that meant. Before then, nobody ever heard music, unless it was there (live). It was a fundamental change, I think every bit as important as the invention of the motor car. It changed our lives and, in fact, it affected us so much that we cannot imagine music being absent from our lives. (It’s there) constantly. Probably too much now.

The obligatory CSNY mention

Anyone writing about music has to be a natural curator – there is no way to listen to, much less write about, 30,000 albums per year – and that’s just the pop market. I have no stats on annual DVD and music doc releases but I’m sure the totals are daunting.

So on this blog, I’m trying to make an effort to write about only things that spark my interest, no matter the box office implications. (Watch for a post on barbershop music soon!) However, blog style seems to dictate that I do a little bit of commenting on major music docs of note so here goes.

I’m not the world’s biggest CSN&Y fan (only like Neil Young solo and Graham Nash’s photography collection) but their 2006 reunion flick, CSNY: Deja Vu is coming out today in limited release. It’s a combination of music and antiwar agitprop directed by the multi-faceted Young himself. Here’s what’s cool: it will be on pay TV and Netflix’s Watch Instantly web streaming service day and date of release. I’ll try to find data to write a follow up post of how the experiment fared. Trailer below.

Lou Reed ist ein Berliner

In February at South by Southwest, I went to Lou Reed’s documentary Berlin with a great fondness for Reed’s music, especially his post-Velvet work. But I’m embarrassed to say that I had never heard a note of Berlin. I’m someone who tends to trust critics and when it was called one of the worst albums ever made in 1973, I felt I could avoid it. (Plus, I had tried Metal Machine Music and since that is basically unlistenable, I knew Reed’s extreme experimentation could be oft putting.)

Berlin bombed in part because of its dark subject matter. The concept album discusses a failing marriage between some depraved junkies. In 2008, such storylines are common so its weird that in 73 (post Walk on the Wild Side) the public viscerally reacted against it. Twenty-five year later, Reed decided to play the whole album live at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn over a few nights, filmed by Julian Schnabel. The doc is mostly all performance, though a thematic sparse film plays behind Reed and his band and is intercut into the film.

Usually, I’m partial to plot and narrative when it comes to music docs but the concert blew me away. For days following, I was obsessed with the songs and the backstory of the album, reading everything I could about it online. The concert features an all star chorus with a Brooklyn Children’s Choir, Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), Sharon Jones and their participation along with the musicians augment and give rich backing to Berlin’s original fidelity. I’m hoping a CD of the concert will be released when the DVD hits the home market in September. I can’t summarize it any better than Camille Dodero of the Village Voice so I’ll quote from her review below and include a clip. Berlin opened in select theaters nationwide this past weekend. Highly recommended:

Lou Reed’s Berlin is one of those rare live-performance documents that truly benefits from proper cinematic context. Reed’s 1973 Berlin, the 10-song tragedy of two junkie lovers, was criminally under-appreciated at the time of its release—turns out it’s nothing short of a masterpiece. Whoops. And until a five-day stretch at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2006, famously grumpy Lou had never performed the record live in full. Fellow 800-pound-gorilla Julian Schnabel showed up with sets, cameras, and ethereal druggy-people projections—pseudo-narrative scenes that end up delicately interspersed within the final cut. The result is a dreamy sepia-toned tableau of existential desolation and art-house incandescence. You weren’t there, but you didn’t need to be: Lou Reed’s Berlin doesn’t simply regurgitate a moment, it rewrites cultural history.

Watch DIG for free!

Legendary music doc DIG is below in its entirely courtesy of Snagfilms, a new service that wants to spread documentaries around the web. Created by Ted Leonis (former AOL honcho and producer of last year’s Nanking doc), its designed with docs in mind. Its easy to spread & share though bloggers like me won’t see a dime – any ad revenues (preroll or onscreen or adjacent, I’m not yetsure which) are split between filmmakers and Snagfilms. But I’m a “filmanthropist” for sharing the work so bask in my warm glow!<P>

Seriously, this is another cool way to distribute docs which often have a social mission in addition to a filmmaker wanting to recoup production costs and make a few pennies for the next film. Super Size Me and Run Runny Granny run were the big docs on the site. For music, aside from DIG, there aren’t yet a whole lot of notable ones (as music licensing make these docs tough to distribute.) But other standouts include Heavy Metal Bagdad, We Are Together and the Pras doc on homelessness. But obviously, the site is sure to add some more.

The Gits Get Remembered

The Gits were one of those bands much admired, much copied, but their original punk songs are rarely heard. It’s probably because the maturing band was still evolving its sound before tragedy struck (not the semi-noble Behind the Music kind but the real deal.) A new film, The Gits, gives the group a proper historical elegy while documenting the senseless, horrible murder of lead singer Mia Zapata. (A full accounting of the band’s history can be found in the Seattle Weekly.

I saw this film at South By Southwest in 2006 so its possible that the theatrical version has been edited in the subsequent two years. But here is what I recall about the film. Its tricky to do a proper accounting of the Gits because of the looming absence of Zapata. She was certainly a pioneer among female punk singers and deserves credit as such. While there is ample footage of the band performing and lots of friends and fans who talk about her charisma, she is rarely heard herself, except on stage. It might have been the filmmaker’s conceit to not let us hear from the woman so many people admired; it also might be because of an actual lack of footage. The Gits had not yet broken big and maybe Zapata had never done any filmed interviews. Not having her voice is in the film powerfully represents her absence but also creates longing for the viewer.

I felt a similar unease to the film throughout, the feeling that there were some stories the bandmates and friends couldn’t or wouldn’t tell. Certainly this reaches an apex in the narrative after Zapata’s body was found in a Seattle alley. Most people killed in a violent manner usually know their offenders and this fact seemed to set off a witch hunt mentality among the close knit community of Seattle punkers, that one of their own could be responsible. (They weren’t.) But there a vague creepiness in this part of the film that was both effective and yet frustrating. It was hard to tell if the filmmakers were making or suppressing some accusations. It was probably only a tangent, which was tempting for an audience, but perhaps distracting for the main purpose of the film, which is to hail the Gits. So while this doc hinted at some interesting subtexts but never quite fully pursued them.

What’s left is this gaping absence of Zapata, the horrible circumstances under which she died and the unfulfilled promise of a band that could have been significant but was robbed of the chance. It’s in select theaters now; clip below.