Hanging Out with D.A. Pennebaker

 By Steve Evans

When I met one of my idols about four years ago, documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, we talked for a bit about his film Monterey Pop, which chronicles the legendary rock music festival in the summer of 1967. It’s my favorite concert film, the template by which all others are judged. The vibe really resonates in my spirit. And the music is fantastic. Woodstock has flashier editing and offers marginally better sound. Gimme Shelter climaxes with an on-camera murder while the Stones crank out Under My Thumb. Zeppelin’s Song Remains the Same, while wall-to-wall with great performances, will clear out your sinus cavities and possibly pluck on your nerves due to the amateurish filmmaking and sloppy editing. Scorsese’s The Last Waltz is beautiful, but elegiac and at times melancholy. Demme’s Stop Making Sense has the coked-up freneticism and weirdness that were hallmarks of The Talking Heads in the mid-1980s. All are good, each in their own way, but….

Only Monterey Pop really nails the scene with its cinéma vérité style (sometimes referred to as “fly on the wall” – observing subjects as unobtrusively as possible). There are absolutely amazing moments peppered throughout this picture. We see that rock stars are as human as everyone else, with all their flaws and foibles, until they hit the stage and become transcendent. I find that fascinating.

The Mamas and Papas were unraveling as the event was happening, even as band leader John Phillips was producing the entire festival with famed rock impresario Lou Adler. The tension shows. John’s wife and fellow band member Michelle had been fired and rehired less than a year earlier after she was caught screwing Gene Clark, lead singer for The Byrds. Mama Cass was in unrequited love with fellow band member Denny Doherty, who also had a fling with Michelle before Monterrey Pop, which would be their penultimate appearance in concert as a group. Improbably, their performance is still a knockout. David Crosby makes political statements while onstage with The Byrds (Gene Clark had quit the band by then), dares censors to censor him, then later appears onstage with Stephen Stills in a set by Buffalo Springfield, a move that got Crosby fired from the Byrds soon after. Cutaway shots to the audience clearly show most of them are tripping balls & titties, and eating a lot of corn on the cob on a stick. In one of the outtakes, comedian Tom Smothers introduces Paul Simon by making a joke about his height. Simon is not amused. Janis Joplin and Ravi Shankar bring down the house with their respective sets. The Who and Jimi Hendrix aren't too shabby, either. Country Joe and the Fish act like they've just arrived from another planet. For background texture, you’ll see a parade of rock royalty roaming through the crowds and backstage. It's bittersweet. At least 7 of the musicians glimpsed in the picture would be dead in less than a decade. Otis Redding was the first to depart. Monterrey Pop made him famous. Six months later, he was dead in a plane crash. Many, many more have left us in the half century since.

I'm babbling about all this to express my love of documentary film, which to me is the best time capsule of all.

D.A. was generous with his time while we were hanging out at the University of Virginia’s Culbreth Theater. At the end of our conversation he declared me “family,” which was an honor only a true cinephile can fully appreciate. I was touched.

One of things we talked about was the challenge of condensing a three-day music festival into a fleeting 79 minutes and 22 seconds of documentary film. D.A. said the editing decisions were among the toughest of his career.  Technical problems in the wild, like film jamming in a camera or the sudden death of batteries in a tape recorder, rendered the footage of some of the bands’ sets unusable. Several of the groups were so stoned that they later objected to being included in the film. So they landed on the cutting room floor. D.A. sculpted miles of footage into a finished film, plus nearly two hours of outtakes left over, and he edited, but did not use, the complete performances of Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding, running about 45 and 20 minutes, respectively.

D.A. explained that because the project was originally planned for television on the ABC network and consequently the film had to run under 90 minutes to allow for commercial breaks, he had to make some difficult choices on what to include. ABC executives apparently were not prepared for what they would get. Jaws reportedly dropped when the finished film was screened. By the time they saw Hendrix humping his amplifier and setting his guitar on fire, the TV people decided to pass on broadcasting the picture. So Monterey Pop ended up getting the theatrical release it always deserved. It was heralded as an instant classic of the documentary form. But by the time the TV executives walked away from the project, it was finished and in the can. So much material had to be left out.

D. A. Pennebaker died last year in August. He was 94.

I was mulling these thoughts last night when I pulled my boxed set of the documentary off the shelf. Like a monkey playing with a bone in Kubrick’s 2001, it dawned on me that I have nearly 6 hours of material on discs, plus access to additional clips here and there online that could be downloaded.

I found the original Monterrey Pop set list for the entire 3-day festival posted on Wikipedia, song by song.

And then it hit me.

By Gawd, my weekend entertainment will be spent in my editing suite. I am going to disassemble the outtakes into individual clips, organize them into the proper sequence as originally performed and cut them together with optical transitions to smooth out the finished product. I have wondered for decades what it must have been like to attend that ungodly music festival. This is as close as I am ever likely to get. 

I don’t expect many or even a few to understand these obsessions of mine, but I believe D.A. would. We are, after all, family.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2020 by Stephen B. Evans. All rights reserved.