Aretha Franklin's "Amazing Grace"

I spent part of this Sunday at church—namely, a nearly empty ArcLight Theater on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, where the Aretha Franklin concert film “Amazing Grace” opened this week.

Aretha charted more times than any other female artist in history. One hundred and twelve times, to be exact. She recorded nearly fifty albums, and the biggest of them all was “Amazing Grace,” a double-platinum live gospel recording she made in 1972 at New Temple Baptist Church—which still stands, about fifteen miles from the ArcLight Theater on Sunset.

The 1972 concert that produced that album was also filmed by a movie crew directed by Sidney Pollack, but somehow he failed to link the film footage with the audio, and the film sat in the vaults for nearly forty years until 2008, when Pollack gave the footage to Alan Elliot. Elliott spent two years synchronizing the film and the music and planned to release the picture, but Aretha sued to block it. After Aretha’s death, Elliott showed the restored film to Franklin’s family and finally got permission late last year to pursue a distribution deal. The film opened this week in theaters across the country.

The backstory behind the “Amazing Grace” is only hinted at in the film, but it’s an exceedingly dramatic one. Aretha began her musical career singing in the largest black church in Detroit, where her father C. L. Franklin was pastor. C.L. took little Aretha on the road with him and oversaw the release of her first gospel recordings. Aretha, heavily influenced by religious singer Clara Ward, became a sensation in the world of black gospel, but when she was nineteen, she told her father that she wanted to record popular music and C. L. negotiated a contract for her with Columbia Records.

During her six years with Columbia Aretha had her first hits and became a successful concert performer, but she didn’t achieve the success that many had predicted for her, and in 1967 she signed with Atlantic Records. Producer Jerry Wexler let her accompany herself on piano and return to her gospel singing style, and he brought Franklin down south to record with the brilliant Muscle Shoals rhythm section. The first Atlantic single by Aretha was the "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)," a huge hit. Aretha was off to the races and within a year she was an international star.

Over the next five years Aretha freed herself from her father’s control and reached a level of musical and professional success that dwarfed that of Ward and other influences. But there was a slice of the black community that did not look kindly on Aretha turning her back on gospel music and leaving her church career, so in 1972 Franklin turned to friend and gospel music legend James Cleveland to help her produce a gospel record, one that would be recorded live at Cleveland’s church in Los Angeles.

The just-released film “Amazing Grace”documents the rehearsals and the two nights of performances at the New Temple Baptist Church. It is a phenomenal film.

James Cleveland was the musical director and soulful host, and his Southern California Community Choir wrapped its huge, joyful sound around the star. Aretha brought her peerless backing band—guitarist Cornell Depree, percussionist Pancho Morales, drummer extraordinaire Bernard Purdie, and the genius bassist Chuck Rainey—which was augmented with the keyboard work of Cleveland, Aretha herself, and Ken Luper.

Most importantly, Aretha brought herself. All of herself. Franklin was thirty years old in 1972, and the Aretha in this film is gorgeous and supremely confident. Vocally, she is at her peak. At the very end of the film, Aretha smiles and appears to relax, but up until that hint of release she is a woman on a mission. She means to show that she is the best singer in the world regardless of style and to do that by proving, once and for all, that she is the the unchallenged queen of gospel music. During the performances she is relentless in digging impossibly deep into the music. She has the church ushers seat her father and Clara Ward right in the middle of the front row so she can simultaneously pay tribute to them and show them in no uncertain terms just how far she has surpassed them both.

There are so many thrilling moments in the film that it’s almost unbearable, but Aretha’s soaring rendition of John Newton’s 1779 hymn “Amazing Grace” is truly shattering. Beginning a capella, Aretha takes the familiar hymn apart and rearranges it, taking each succeeding verse to ever more impossible emotional and musical heights. By the time she is midway through the song Aretha has the members of Cleveland’s choir spontaneously leaping, shouting, and crying, the audience is transported, and James Cleveland is utterly overcome and weeping into a handkerchief.

All cultures have compellingly told their stories in music, and song is the supreme expression of humanity. But Aretha’s performance in “Amazing Grace” leaves no doubt that black gospel music—a music born out of the degradation of slavery—and her unique voice have no equals when it comes to telling the story—all of it—of the human spirit. In these seemingly dark times, when it feels as if the loudest voices are the ones that are preaching hatred, revenge, fear, and cruelty, it is no overstatement to claim that experiencing this film can give us renewed hope and make us better people. Hopefully those theater seats will start filling up in the coming week and “Amazing Grace” will achieve the impact it deserves on a vast audience that sorely needs it.

Buster Keaton

Happy 123rd birthday to Buster Keaton.

One evening when I was in college I plunked myself down in a stiff lecture-hall seat for “Wednesday Night at the Movies,” which is what we called the American film studies class taught by Andrew Sarris, the film critic for the Village Voice. Sarris was a world-class windbag—his lectures were often longer than the films that followed them—but he knew his stuff cold, and I saw many cinema classics for the first time thanks to his class. Sarris’ topic on this particular night was Buster Keaton, and the chosen feature was “Steamboat Bill, Jr.”

I didn’t know it, but there was a Keaton revival mushrooming at the time. The Great Stone Face’s rightful place in cinema history had been obscured by the enormous shadow of Charlie Chaplin for decades, and many of his films were thought to have been lost forever. In a weird circumstance that could have come right out of “Sherlock Jr.,” Keaton’s homage to sleuthery, his old Hollywood mansion had been purchased by the actor James Mason, and Mason had discovered a stash of flawless prints of many of Keaton’s films in a hidden compartment in the house. Raymond Rohauer signed a distribution deal with Keaton, and it was one of his prints that Sarris was screening that night.

Most film professors would have opted to show Buster’s much-honored masterpiece, “The General,” but I owe Sarris one: “Steamboat Bill Jr.” was, for me, the perfect introduction to Keaton.

First, it’s propelled by one of Keaton’s most charming story lines—an effete man-child struggles to gain the love of rugged father by helping him save his decrepit steamboat business.

Second, it’s set in Keaton’s favorite milieu—the great outdoors, where the laws of physics (especially gravity and momentum) and the natural cycle of wind, rain, and fire rule but where steady, resolute men can harness those forces to do amazing things.

Third, it’s a silent film, so outside of the rare, terse titles (Keaton’s films had the fewest, shortest titles of the silent era) the film is a relentless visual feast, a cavalcade of pure-cinema moments that deliver everything from subtle character revelations to perfectly executed sight gags to jaw-dropping, what-did-I-just-see impossibilities. You could make a strong case that Buster Keaton was the greatest stunt man in the history of film, and some of his greatest physical feats and gymnastic pratfalls are immortalized within the frames of “Steamboat Bill Jr.”

Within a few months, the Elgin Theater in the Village hosted a major Keaton retrospective, and I was there every night. I remember sitting at one showing behind a street performer I had seen in my neighborhood named Philippe Petit, who two years later would become famous for his high-wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center—exactly the kind of person who would appreciate Buster Keaton and who would have been appreciated by him.

When Buster Keaton entered his formative years, he was already a seasoned, professional clown. From the age of three, his miniature Irishman character was a key part of his parents’ highly successful vaudeville act, which consisted mainly of Keaton’s father throwing him all over the theater in a cyclone of familial violence. Buster (whose nickname was bestowed on him by family friend Harry Houdini) discovered that he got bigger laughs when he froze his little face into a mask of adult-level seriousness and endured his treatment silently. He was purely visual comedian from the very beginning.

Buster left the family act when he turned 22 in 1917. He signed a lucrative contract to be a part of a major Broadway show, but before rehearsals began he ran into Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, an acquaintance from vaudeville, on the street in New York City. Arbuckle had gone into the movie business, and he invited Keaton to visit his New Jersey film studio the next day. Keaton ended up an extra, and stole the film.

Before he left that day, Buster had the cameraman open the camera and explain how it worked. Within a week, Keaton had gotten out of his theater contract and signed with Arbuckle at one sixth the salary. Two years later, after starring in a series of shorts, Keaton owned his own studio and was producing highly successful feature films.

Keaton’s films were instantly popular because they were distinctly different. His stoic everyman character made Chaplin’s tramp look manic by comparison, and, unlike Chaplin, Keaton never went for pathos. Buster spurned the easy, cost-effective use of constant cross cuts to achieve visual effects in favor of long, extended, uninterrupted camera sequences. The power of Keaton’s films was that what you saw was actually what happened in front of the camera. But despite his theater background, Keaton never ever thought of film as a way to photograph what would happen on stage. He understood immediately that film was an infinitely better medium for his comic genius than the theater ever was or would be. And so, from the very start, Keaton’s films were films. The best of them—“The General,” “The Navigator,” and “Steamboat Bill Jr.’’—are some of the purest films in the history of that medium, even though they are some of the first.

In his short homage to vaudeville, “The Playhouse,” Keaton plays everyone—the performers, the musicians in the pit orchestra, the audience, even a chimpanzee. The nine members in the minstrel show act? Nine separate Busters, all on screen at once, singing and dancing in unison. The film people in Hollywood returned again and again to see minstrel act in “The Playhouse” and to try to determine how Keaton achieved it. Buster had covered the camera lens with nine strips of tape. One strip was removed and at a pre-arranged signal Buster, placed at the far edge of the stage, started the routine. The film was then rewound back to the starting point, another sliver of the lens was exposed, and Buster performed the act again. The same film was exposed and rewound nine times—and in those days cameras were hand cranked—and no seams are visible in the shot.

Although he worked all his life, Buster Keaton lost control of his films as talking films were introduced and lost a couple of decades to alcoholism. He lived to beat the bottle, marry the love of his life, retire to a modest ranch outside of Los Angeles, to see his own resurrection as a film genius, and to attend film festivals in the U.S. and Europe dedicated to his phenomenal body of work.

(The director Peter Bogdanovich just released a solid documentary, “The Great Buster,” but the best telling of Buster’s life and career remains Kevin Brownlow’s three-part television series from 1987, “A Hard Act To Follow.” All of Keaton’s features and most of his short films are available from Kino Films.)

The Oscars

My son Devin is a staff writer for The Jimmy Kimmel show, and he picked up a sweet sideline gig writing jokes for the Oscars, which Kimmel is hosting again this year. Tonight Devin is closeted backstage at the Oscars with other writers, feeding Kimmel jokes in real time. He just texted me this photo of him backstage in his first purchased tux with Oscar. The joke "Oscar is 90 years old, which means that he's at home watching Fox News" in Kimmel's opening monologue was the first of Devin's gags. Lots of hard work and long hours will culminate for him at Kimmel's after party. He's promised more photos. I want a shot of him with Sam Rockwell.

Republicans--an age-old problem

Just in case you were under the impression that Republicans were a new plague upon our great nation...

This is just a short clip from a 1932 WC Fields movie that demonstrates all too well that the political thinking of Americans hasn't changed much over the years.

The Art Life

The IFC theater in the Village is hosting a week-long David Lynch film festival. Highlights have included Lynch's early student films (Lynch was unmistakenly Lynch from the very beginning) and the theater premiere of "David Lynch: The Art Life," a brilliant and illuminating examination of what drives America's most creative filmmaker and visual artist. Tomorrow: a new print of "Eraserhead," which astounded me when I first saw it as the midnight movie at the Elgin, also in the Village, nearly forty years ago. I've come full circle.

Buster and the Nighthawks

Buster Keaton literally cut his teeth in vaudeville (he was a pro at the age of five), and this afternoon he returned to Manhattan's theater district. Town Hall was packed for a screening of Keaton's great film, "The Cameraman," the last film on which he had creative control. The festivities started with an hilarious Laurel and Hardy short (featuring a very young Jean Harlow). The great American clown Bill Irwin did a very funny skit with an endless pot of spaghetti that was followed by the feature. Two things made the show especially memorable--Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks played fantastic period music throughout, matching the films and Irwin's skit masterfully, and, as it was a Family Day program, there were lots of kids in attendance. A small boy sitting front of me was literally bouncing up and down in his seat, he was laughing so hard. I can think of only a couple of things in life more pleasurable than Buster Keaton on the big screen with a live orchestra in a hall filled with laughter.