Film

Amazing Grace width=Amazing Grace (2018)

Scandal PosterScandal (1989)

During the final edit, I dropped a chapter from White Bicycles. It didn’t really fit into the flow of the book, being about the events surrounding the making of the film “Scandal”, which I produced in 1988 (but which was about the Sixties, which was why I wrote the chapter in the first place). Taken out of the context of the book, it still makes a good yarn, so consider it a ‘bonus track‘ to White Bicycles, available only online!

A Film About Jimi Hendrix PosterA Film About Jimi Hendrix (1973)

In 1970, I gave a friend £500 to save a film negative from being thrown away by the lab. It was that great clip of Jimi Hendrix playing a 12-string acoustic guitar and led, via a circuitous route to my producing the Warner Brothers documentary “Jimi Hendrix”. Jimi’s manager had always encouraged film-makers to shoot his performances, but then demanded ownership of the footage, which left a lot of never-seen film lying around when Jimi died. My co-film-makers John Head and Gary Weis and I persuaded a lot Jimi’s friends and peers to be interviewed. That, combined with so much great live footage, makes for a film that, I think, stands the test of time. The recent documentary that aired on US tv paid us a sort of compliment by seeking out many of the same people we talked to for interviews…

It doesn’t get shown that often these days, perhaps because we decided to go against the grain by making it in “Academy width”, the old-fashioned nearly square format, rather than wide screen, so modern wide-screen projections tend to cut off top and bottom. But it is available on dvd and download from Warner Brothers!