By the time Michael Wadleigh got to Woodstock in August 1969, he was a 27-year-old Emmy Award-winning filmmaker accompanied by a crew of 80 (including Martin Scorsese) to chronicle what was billed simply as “three days of peace and music.”
His film, “Woodstock,” won an Academy Award and set the standard for rock concert films. But don’t look for Wadleigh at Woodstock ’94, the festival that will mark the original’s 25th anniversary.
“They’ve taken a great event that was a counterculture landmark and turned it into an establishment enterprise,” he said in a phone interview. “I’m not going to have anything to do with it.”
“The bad guys,” as he calls them, inspired him to compile a “director’s cut” of “Woodstock,” with 40 minutes of extra music and festival footage. It’s a bummer that the film’s limited theatrical engagement bypassed Chicago, but it will be available next week in a letterboxed, double cassette edition released by Warner Home Video for $29.98 suggested retail.
The new footage is comprised mostly of performances that almost made the original film: “A Change Is Gonna Come” by Canned Heat; “Voodoo Chile” by Jimi Hendrix; “Wake Me Lord” by Janis Joplin; and “Won’t You Try” and “Uncle Sam’s Blues” by Jefferson Airplane.
New technology allowed Wadleigh to remix and restore what was even in 1970 a state-of-the-art film.
“Pictorially,” he said, “there were almost no new toys except better film stock. In the sound area, now we’re talking real impact. We went back to the original eight tracks and digitized the sound. A new computer called Sonic Solution (allowed us to) go in and take out all the garbage.”
In readying “Woodstock” for re-release, Wadleigh discovered that the times indeed have changed. The counterculture, he observed, has been replaced by the commerce culture. Woodstock ’94 is heavy on the corporate sponsorships, earning it his derisive nickname, “Polystock,” after a major record label.
Further, there are legal hassles from the Hendrix estate and one of the original performers, Richie Havens. “I suppose it is a sign of the times,” he said.
All the more reason to re-experience “Woodstock.”
Wadleigh himself had not seen the film since 1972.
“This is like a festival out of time,” he said. “Don’t think of it as a piece of nostalgia. There’s hardly even any tie-dye visible. The kids don’t look that much different from the grunge kids today.
“And in the wake of all this commercialization of the landmark event that named a generation,” he added, “the name of the game is if you want to see the real thing, this is it.”
– The video of the much-anticipated documentary series “Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns,” creator of the documentary “The Civil War,” will be released Sept. 23, immediately after its broadcast on PBS. The nine-cassette boxed set will cost $179.98 retail. It will be released by Turner Home Entertainment.
– Throughout August, participating Blockbuster Video stores will offer Kidprint, a free video identification program that provides parents of children up to age 12 with a free videotape record to give police and the media should their child be reported missing.
Children are recorded against a height chart and are asked questions to preserve on video their voice and mannerisms. More than 650,000 children have been taped since the program’s inception in 1990.
– “Thunderbirds” are go! Polygram Video, which distributes the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, is hoping that the live-wire “supermarionation” TV series from the 1960s, recently resurrected on the Fox network, will be video’s next cult sensation. Four volumes of adventures featuring International Rescue and the intrepid Tracy family will be available in stores Aug. 9 for $9.95 each.
– “Farewell My Concubine,” 1993’s most honored foreign film, will debut Sept. 21 on Touchstone Home Video.
