There aren't a whole lot of potential Hendrix concert films available.  We have Monterey, Woodstock, Isle of Wight, Atlanta Pop, the somewhat truncated Berkeley shows, the obligatory Rainbow Bridge volcano crater thing.  Most of that has already been released.

Which is why it's so inexlicable that the one remaining project continues to linger in limbo.  The February 24 Royal Albert Hall performance, filmed on 35mm, surreptitiously available in incomplete, and usually poorly edited form, but despite the hopes and promises of the Hendrix estate, the original negatives have yet to be processed into product.  The short term explanation is that the ever-fussy Hendrix was less-than-satisfied with the results.  The rights were signed over to two producers, Steve Gold and Jerry Goldstein, but somehow a "partner" Bernie Solomon got involved and the original negative is still owned by his widow, Donna, and negotiations with the estate have been ongoing.  None of this stopped a slew of posthumous releases of soundboard recordings from the show on cheap labels (official bootlegs, basically), which have been utilized by long time engineer Eddie Kramer as well (he disguised this show's "Little Wing" and "Voodoo Chile" onto the Hendrix in the West LP).  The concert ends with a jam of the then-embryonic version of "Room Full of Mirrors" with Traffic.  All of the booted versions of the film footage include a variety of poorly executed psychedelic effects in order to pad, or enhance, the effect, so the restoration of the negative is crucial.

This was a restless time for Hendrix.  The Experience would be kaput within four months, and he would be looking to expand his sound, and ultimately meeting resistence to that.  But this show has to be preferable to another show that was captured on celluloid, the Winter Festival for Peace at Madison Square Garden January 28, 1970, the last show by the Band of Gypsies.  The only documented instances of Hendrix taking heroin was in the company of Devon Wilson (Dolly Dagger), and here the junk didn't play nice with a dose of LSD, resulting in Jimi warning from the stage "That's what happens when Earth fucks with Space, never forget that", before leaving the stage to purge in the toilet.  That footage is never coming out, so all we got is an audience recording.  The Band of Gypsies were fired that night, although Jimi brought Billy Cox back.  According to Sarah Lawrence, Jimi didn't mind not paying for Buddy Miles' room service bills anymore, and ultimately wanted a more kinetic drummer anyway.



 

The Stones have done a decent job of excavating their reel-wells.  Gimme Shelter, Rock and Roll Circus, Charlie Is My Darling.  But this?  Probably won't ever be released, and it's a question now of who needs it can usually find it, but it is about as fine a portrait of the pulse of 1972 rock star experience as could possibly be plastered.

Cocksucker Blues, as a theme, got its origin in the band's disgruntled divorce from manager Allen Klein.  Klein wasn't stupid, and knew that the Stones were sitting on "Brown Sugar", and knew that it was going to be a definitive hit.  He sued the band saying they owed him a single.  They shipped over "Cocksucker Blues".  ("Where do I get my cock sucked?  Where do I get my ass fucked?  I may have no money, but I know where to put it every time.")  They eventually settled by letting Klein include "Brown Sugar" on his Hot Rocks cash grab.  (One of my first Stones's acquisitions, tbh.)

Robert Frank was a Warhol photographer who had shot the covers of Sticky Fingers and Exile, so it seemed like a natural fit to allow him full access to shoot whatever happens on this pinnacle of bacchanalic expedition.  All the airplane orgies.  Naked girls covered in coke.  Keef's breakfast syringe.  Mick fondling himself by the pool.  Tina Turner having the bad timing of stopping by while Mick's wife is coming to town.  Utter indulgence.  Sorry, Rob.  We're going to put out a serviceably tepid New York show instead called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones because this is just too fucking real.  And the band keeps smirking like they don't know how.

Incidentally, 50 years, folks.  Would have been nice to see a glorious little set for the 1972 tour, maybe some DVDs of footage, mixed with what had been excellently archived in the Crossfire Hurricane documentary, some live recordings, nice coffee table book, some swag, a flag, a poster or two.  I guess Mick is too busy getting covid.  Would've been nice, guys.

What’s remarkable about so many of these is how high profile they are. These aren’t random arthouse pieces from some cozy, dimly lit, far corner of the indiesphere. Stones, Beatles and Jimi? That’s a pretty solid trifecta. The concerns about revealings of various scandalous debaucheries from Cocksucker’s Blues, alright, (though it’s no hangin’ matter), but feature–length Jimi and Beatles concealed in the unopened can? And yet the ECU of John Lennon’s full–monty good–day–sunshine rising to the occasion from cold turkey to head–in–the–clouds is fair game.
If and when Jackson is able to make good on what we hope he’s promising, it’ll be “Your move, Hendrix estate!”

Oh shit, begging a thousand pardons, Mister Dylan. “Quadfecta?” Put Rampop back in quarantine; he’s still contagious!!!

I’m writing this in the tub without my readers, so another mea culpa for any syntactic sins.

This might be a bit too recent for your thread, but at TIFF this week (which I've been attending, I'll post reviews soon, I swear), The People's Joker, a trans coming of age story that's also kinda sorta Batman parody by Vera Drew (who I understand directed some Tim & Eric stuff and Sasha Baron Cohen's Who is America?) got pulled after one screening after legal threats from Warner Brothers. This Wired story goes into more detail.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-peoples-joker-vera-drew-rights-issues/

I did not manage to see the movie, although the reactions from my Letterboxd network have been extremely positive.

Last edited by Rock (9/18/2022 2:29 am)

Be nice, JJ. Give the people what they want (their Joker).

We haven't heard much from the Missing Movies Office in recent months, but the Wheels of Justice often turn slowly, and all things must wait their turn.

This next installment is a big case file and will likely warrant more than one entry.



The Nesmith Files
or,
The Case of the Missing Pacific Arts Catalog
or,
Some other yet–to–be determined catchy name deserving of the honor

This investigation started with a typical sweep through the YouTube annals in search of Firesign Theatre finds. While much of the Firesigns’ stuff is available in one format or another, the unearthing of various and sundry obscure Firesign relics is not uncommon. This search turned up something extraordinary. A Firesign Theater movie, easily their best, which none on our team had either seen or heard of before. The upload was clearly an old VCR recording of a television broadcast, and the tape was worn to such poor quality that the second half was hardly watchable. But the first half contained some of the freshest and most well–produced Firesign material to come along at that time, 1983, which was almost a decade after their classic peak material. The title: Nick Danger and the Case of the Missing Yolk.

Our research team shit a bag of bricks. Agent JJ posted links in the YouTube Drive–In and Agent Rampop initiated a deeper investigation into the nature and whereabouts of this production of interest. Not long after the initial discovery, the video was scrubbed from YouTube. Further investigation revealed that this movie was not only being periodically scrubbed from YouTube but from the Internet in general, by a law firm located in southern California.

With investigators undeterred and emboldened, the inquiry evolved into a cinephile’s equivalent of an outright manhunt. “Treasure–hunt” would be too tame of a description. The initiative had become a vendetta, fueled in part by an intense opposition to the practice of “sitting on” beloved creative works by parties who had nothing to do with their creation, production, or distribution, but whose hands they had merely fallen into. Tactics became so unrestrained that the successful acquisition of a copy eventually entailed the purchase of a used Betamax machine on ebay, numerous patch cables and a meticulous editing job at the lab to remove tracking lines. With a commercial Beta copy now in–hand, we found that it had been produced and distributed by Mike Nesmith’s company, Pacific Arts.

And this is where things really get interesting… 

Last edited by Rampop II (1/31/2023 12:58 am)

Should I edit in a wool cap in that post?


[img]https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.1315448862.0631/ur,pin_large_front,square,600x600.jpg[/img]

Salvador Dali: A Soft Self–Portrait (1970), a documentary featuring the man himself, narrated by Orson Welles, also distributed by Pacific Arts. There's of course nothing like it, and it seems a good guess that Emo Phillips was taking cues from this film for his recent, spot–on portrayal of Dali in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. This bizarre up–close tour through the life of the then–living Dali, full of surrealist enigmas (a baby being born from a pig carcass, Dali screaming at the camera in "Dalinian English" about the trauma of childbirth, and the ritual sacrifice of a grand piano), has been unavailable commercially ever since its release on laserdisc in the 1980s, and there are no known plans for it to again see the light of day. And that's a goddamned shame.

Last edited by Rampop II (1/31/2023 1:25 am)

Some Pacific Arts productions do remain available on the commercial market, including Timerider and Repo Man. But our questions remain unanswered about how deep the Pacific Arts catalog goes, and how many Pacific Arts productions remain under wraps. But some-body's apparently minding the store, paying for those lawyers to scrub Nesmith's out–of–print productions from the Internet.
Nesmith is survived by four children, from three different marriages, but we aren't privy to the details of his last will and testament, or whether he even had one. One would hope that a quadruple–bypass surgery he underwent in 2018 might've inspired him to get such affairs in order.  But it's probably a safe bet to expect more court battles to come before we'll see fresh releases of such cult classics steadily fading into obscurity. And that's a damn shame. 

Last edited by Rampop II (1/31/2023 1:26 am)