Back on January 13, 1972, a young corduroy-clad, sideburn-sporting filmmaker named Sydney Pollack arrived at the New Bethel Baptic Church in Los Angeles where Aretha Franklin was recording a live album of gospel standards. This album, Amazing Grace, would eventually reach double-platinum status and turn into the biggest seller of Franklin’s career. However, back in early January of ’72 it was simply something she was recording with an actual church choir. Pollack was on hand with a crew of film and sound engineers and five 16mm cameras to turn the recording session into a documentary which would come out at the same time as the album. He had zero experience with making that kind of movie, but he’d just made They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? . So, that seemed to make everything okay.
Well, it wasn’t okay. Pollack spent two days recording Franklin at the Church, and he screwed up royally. He forgot to bring any clapper boards with him, and without those snapping shut at the beginning of each take the sound and picture never synchronized properly. Plus, with no clapper boards to act as signposts for the editors the resulting rolls of film looked like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
As an example, here’s Kristen Bell with a clapper board on the set of Veronica Mars
Pollack had 20 hours of worthless footage. No matter how many months the editors put into it, they couldn’t synchronize the video and audio, not even when the Church choir director sat in to help out. In the ensuing decades, Pollack routinely pondered the idea of finally syncing everything up and giving the world the long-lost Aretha Franklin documentary, but he’d always get busy with something else.
Now, it’s 43 years later, and a former Atlantic A&R staffer named Alan Elliott has gone back and finished the documentary. He worked with Pollack on it up until his cancer-related death in 2008, and two years after that he finally succeeded in syncing the movie. However, ever since then one surprising person has stepped forward to stop the documentary from seeing the light of day: Aretha Franklin.
She stopped Elliott from doing anything with the documentary in 2011, suing him for appropriating her likeness without permission. They settled out of court, and he agreed not to show Amazing Grace without her permission.
It’s four years later, and she was just granted an injunction to prevent today’s premiere of Amazing Grace at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. She’s similarly seeking to prevent it from screening at next weekend’s Toronto Film Festival.
What changed? Why is Elliott trying to show Amazing Grace if Franklin clearly doesn’t want him to? Because when he settled suit with her a couple of years ago she had all the leverage. He’d successfully located all of the 1972 legal release forms signed by everyone who is featured in the documentary other than the star herself: Franklin’s contract was mysteriously missing. Well, it’s not missing anymore. As THR explained:
The reason Elliott hadn’t been able to locate it was because her paperwork had been signed in 1969, not 1972 — and what she signed was a personal service contract for both the movie studio and record label that effectively gave them full rights to the material filmed in the Watts church (and now, Elliott believes, he’s got the rights, as the film’s new owner).
What 1969 Aretha Franklin and 2015 Aretha Franklin agreed to are two different things, though. 2015 Franklin’s lawyer says, “Once we make a decision [to litigate], Alan Elliott won’t be able to show that film in his garage.” That would be ironic because in order to purchase the Amazing Grace negatives from Warner Bros. Elliott mortgaged his home. Now, that may be the only place he can screen it.
It’s up the lawyers to figure everything out for sure. These type of “Did the transfer of ownership of the physical materials and artistic rights invalidate prior contracts?” lawsuits happen all the time in Hollywood. What’s really at play here is simply that Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, wants to be compensated. There’s a new documentary out there all about the recording of one of her best albums, and she’s not getting anything directly from it, cut out of any distribution sale Elliott might land on the film festival circuit.
At the moment, Elliott can simply conclude, “I understand she’s used to getting paid a lot of money to do promotion for a project like this. But I hope at some point she will come around. I always want to do right by Aretha.”
Here’s the trailer:
Source: THR
