It’s no surprise that this year’s Emmy nonfiction races are filled with films and series about iconic musicians, because music docs have been a main-stay at film festivals, in theaters and on television for decades. But the 2024-2025 season feels particularly robust, and particularly long on films about giants, from the Beatles to John Williams to Bruce Springsteen.
“I’m interested in story and conflict and characters and through lines in music,” said director David Tedeschi, who has worked with Martin Scorsese on documentaries about Bob Dylan, George Harrison, David Johansen and, this year, the Beatles. “And music is often a document of what artists were going through in the moment. So to tell those stories and to have the power of that music to go with it, it can be a very satisfying experience.”
This survey of a few of the most notable music films starts with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the musician turned Oscar-winning director who is in the thick of it with a Hulu film about Sly Stone and another on NBC about the 50-year history of music on “Saturday Night Live.”
“Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)” and “Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music“
Thompson worked on his two new music docs simultaneously: He spent his week- days chronicling the dark life and career of the protean funk pioneer Sly Stone, who squandered his talent and fame by losing himself in drugs, and his weekends escaping in the music of “Saturday Night Live” over the past half-century.
When we talked after you had made “Summer of Soul” but before it won the Oscar, you were already planning a film about Sly Stone, who appeared in that first film.
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson: When we were doing the doc and I was watching the Sly footage (from a performance in the summer of 1969), I was like, wow, Sly doesn’t know that this is the chapter before the world will open. He’s about to play Woodstock, and he’ll be God in less than five months. And I always wanted to know: What was the experience of his success between ’70 and ’72 that resulted in (the dark, classic album) “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” but also resulted in the band breaking up?
I remember the avalanche of offers that came in after “Summer of Soul,” and the cold calls coming in: Elton John, Obama … Wait, what? But when Common pitched me Sly, it got real.
You are making a movie about a guy who had it all and squandered it, and a movie that explores the difficulties faced by the best Black artists. And you’re making this in the aftermath of having your first movie win an Oscar and bring you lots of other offers.
Oh, the irony. (Laughs) Three weeks ago, my mom saw an interview where I said, “I made this for Lauryn, D’Angelo, Frank Ocean, Will Smith, Kanye, Chris Rock, whoever …” And she was like, “I kind of think you made this film for you.” And my reaction was “Busted.”
Every day I wake up wondering: Is my takedown about to happen? Or let me say that I used to wake up that way every day. I think maybe I made this film to force me to accept love, accolades, things that make me uncomfortable. I mean, it would be painfully ironic if I do anything close to what Sly did in the film as I’m publicly telling the world, “Yes, I’m making this film for people who self-sabotage.”
(Laughs) Maybe subconsciously, I made this film to force me to … It’s almost like announcing a diet to the public. Now I got to see it through, you know what I mean? I guess that’s what I did.
The first ten minutes of the “Saturday Night Live” documentary is an insane mash-up of hundreds of snippets from “SNL” musical performances playing off each other. Was that the DJ part of your brain taking over?
The way that we structured it, I joke that this was my “CSI” crime board, as far as having pictures and yarn that connect them and all that stuff. Literally every song performance on “SNL,” I made a note. All the fast songs, all the slow songs, all the different genres. I went through about three to seven episodes a day for an entire year. And because I think like a DJ, I already know, OK, this song’s 112 BPM and it’s in E minor, but the bridge is in G and that way we can connect to the next song.
When we had a good five minutes, I showed it to NBC and said, “Guys, what do you think?” And their jaws dropped. I was like, “Is this going to be a clearance nightmare?” And they were like, “It absolutely is going to be a clearance nightmare.”
Twenty-four songs did not clear. And I said, “Dude, give me a month.” I pretty much had to go hand-in-hand (to all the musicians). And with the exception of a brilliant moment where Pavarotti is doing something with Mary J. Blige, I got everything cleared. Maybe for a few people, I had to physically fly to them and show them. “Wait, you flew all the way out to show me this?” “Yes. Please tell your lawyer to approve it.” And the answer was always “Yeah, I want to be a part of history.”
“Beatles ’64“
In February 1964, less than three months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Beatles touched down in New York City to make their first three appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Rock ’n’ roll would never be the same, and neither would popular culture. The Disney+ documentary commemorates the 60th anniversary of that visit, with director David Tedeschi and producer Martin Scorsese utilizing footage shot by Albert and David Maysles for a 1964 doc, along with interviews with a variety of people whose lives were changed, including Smokey Robinson, David Lynch and Jamie Bernstein, an avid fan and the daughter of Leonard Bernstein.
So much has been said, written and put on screen about the Beatles, including Peter Jackson’s recent “Get Back” series and Ron Howard’s movie from a couple of years ago that covered some of the same territory that yours does. Making this film, how conscious were you of what else was out there?
David Tedeschi: We’re always conscious of what came before, and so we did feel at the very beginning, Gosh, how do we make yet another Beatles film? And how do we make it on the short deadline that we had? But we realized two things pretty quickly. One was that we were doing something only two years after “Get Back” that was almost a bookend. That was about the end of the Beatles, and we were doing something from the very beginning. Yes, the Beatles had been together for quite a while, but this was the beginning of Beatlemania as a worldwide craze.
It was a real advantage to be dealing with such a small amount of time. It’s about that moment when they came to New York. And in a way, it’s about the fans as much as it’s about the band. It’s about something that happened in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and all the changes that were building up from the ’50s and the ’60s: civil rights, women’s rights, the anti-war movement. There was a great richness of material in that moment.
When you sat down to look through all the footage that Jackson’s company had restored, even though you were dealing with a group as well-known as the Beatles, were there things that came as revelations?
Maybe it was the fans in that moment in New York. New York changes so quickly; that was a real revelation to me that these young girls and boys were so excited. And the people we interviewed, their lives changed upon hearing the Beatles’ music. It was fascinating on an energy level. I’ve lived in New York for 40 years, and I’ve never seen what happened in those days in 1964, you know?
You mentioned a short deadline.
They really wanted the movie to be released in 2024 for the 60th anniversary. So we had to move quickly.
Was it hard to finish it in time?
We made it. (Laughs) That’s all I’m going to say about it. Did I always think we were going to make it? Not necessarily.
“Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band“
Over the past 24 years, director and editor Thom Zimny has made around 14 long-form films with Bruce Springsteen, most of them devoted to specific albums or concerts. But the Disney+/Hulu doc “Road Diary” focuses on Springsteen’s world tour after the pandemic, an outing that has recently drawn the ire of Donald Trump. The film is a broader and more expansive chronicle that delves into the history of the band and its relationship with its fans.
When you started filming rehearsals for the tour, did you have a sense of the kind of movie you and Bruce wanted to make?
Thom Zimny: The beauty of working with Bruce is that we don’t go in with a set POV. This started with Bruce saying, “We’re going to get the guys together, rehearse the band. Come on by and do some filming.” And for me, my collaboration with (Springsteen’s manager) Jon Landau and with Bruce is just to be present. And what happened was I saw an emotional story, because it was a story about a band returning after the world shut down. And also Bruce had new music that felt very in sync with the moment of coming back to a world now experiencing this community.
The concerts on this tour included lots of hits, but they also told a story about aging and loss.
I witnessed in the rehearsals, and also in the performances, Bruce talking to the audience in a way that felt very different, that was dealing with these themes of mortality. The songs had an emotional arc. You might have a song from the past that you loved in a certain context. But after our world changed and what we have survived in the last few years, and with time itself passing within the band, you felt like these songs were different. And Bruce was aware of that by setting up a setlist that had an emotional impact. I didn’t want to make a concert film with the clichés of rock ’n’ roll. I paid close attention to the storyteller.
But at the same time people will feel shortchanged if they don’t get to hear their favorite songs. How do you balance that?
It’s a great question. I think the way you balance a film is to look at your musical sections in what they are serving for the story. A lot of the songs that I picked were helping with the themes that the interviews were sharing, the themes that Bruce’s voice-overs were sharing. You don’t go down a road of music for music’s sake —you keep to the story.
“Music by John Williams“
Composer John Williams has received an enormous number of accolades during his lengthy career, including 26 Grammys and 54 Academy Award nominations, more than any other living person and second only to Walt Disney in Oscar history. But while he’s written many of the most celebrated film scores of all time, he had never had a movie made about him until French-American filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau teamed with both Lucasfilm and Amblin to make this Disney+ film.
John was not necessarily eager to have a documentary about himself, was he?
Laurent Bouzereau: No. I’ve known John for quite some time, and I was not the only one asking him to do this. But he was always “No, no, no, no.” But then he turned 90 and there was a big event for him at the Kennedy Center. I was asked to film a bunch of directors wishing him a happy birthday, which turned into long discussions about their relationship with John, but also about film music and how John had legitimized an art form that I think even back in the ’70s was not necessarily recognized in the same canon as classical music.
After I did the 90th-birthday stuff, I said to Steven (Spielberg), “This is ridiculous. We have a bank of material between your home movies, the Lucasfilm archive and my own archive. Someone will do a documentary about John, and it would be a shame not to have us do it. So he asked John, and John said yes. But then John’s enthusiasm quickly started wearing down. He said to me, “Listen, I just don’t want to talk about myself.” I said, “John, it’s not going to be about you.” He said, “Well, what’s it going to be about?” “It’s about music. It’s about your music.”
I think that convinced him that I was out to tell a musical story as opposed to a personal story. But his music is directly linked to his life, so he was able to get there because we were talking in musical terms. I never asked him about his wife passing, ever. (Williams’ first wife Barbara Ruick died of an aneurysm in 1974, at the age of 41.) I said, “Tell me about the first Violin Concerto.” And he talked about his wife, because he wrote it after she passed.
The amount of iconic music that he wrote is staggering, but it must be hard to figure out what to put in the film and what to leave out.
The one thing you have to give up is thinking you’re going to be definitive. There was a fear of the film being a hit parade, so I tried to embrace a structure that felt a little more unpredictable. I tried to make it so that even if I’m playing iconic music cues, they still come as a surprise.
This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
