Doc traces the Bee Gees from the start
Over the years the Bee Gees story hasn’t been told with quite the same reverence as, say, the Beatles’.
But Frank Marshall’s “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” — premiered at 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 12, on HBO — gives the brothers Gibb their just due.
The nearly two- hour, authorized documentary combines loads of rare footage and insightful new interviews with sole surviving Bee Gee Barry Gibb as well as onetime label- mate Eric Clapton, admirers such as Justin Timberlake, Nick Jonas, Coldplay’s Chris Martin and Noel Gallagher, Bee Gees band members, producers, recording engineers and others. It doesn’t skirt the darker aspects of the group’s history, but it mostly sheds light on how impactful and underrated the Bee Gees are — even with worldwide record sales estimated at more than 200 million over the course of 55 years.
And, of course, as the film rolls into all those “Saturday Night Fever” hits, you will be dancing ....
• Marshall, 74, works primarily as a film producer (including hits such as “The Color Purple,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and the “Back to the Future” and “Jurassic World” series) and picks his directing shots carefully. The Bee Gees story, he says via Zoom, appealed to him as the son of a musician- composer father and the oldest of three brothers who also had a band. “I was a big Bee Gees fan, but I was really interested in how the family thing worked, having worked with my brothers for 10 minutes as a band. ... So there was that, and the longevity they had. That’s what I was interested in — and how all those things happen. And, of course, who doesn’t remember all those songs?”
• The result, Marshall adds, is that the fi lm “is really about family.” Born
“The movie is a love story — this is a family, they’re all still together, they live in Miami. It’s really about how great and wonderful a family can be. That’s really the theme and the message for me — love your family.”
— Frank Marshall, director
in the U. K., on the Isle of Man, the brothers Gibb formed their first skiffle group in the 1950s in Manchester, England before moved with their parents to Australia, where they had their first recording success.
“The movie is a love story — this is a family, they’re all still together, they live in Miami. It’s really about how great and wonderful a family can be. That’s really the theme and the message for me — love your family.”
• Marshall says he felt a great kinship with Barry Gibb, who’s just 12 days older.
“He’s ref lective now. He wants the story to be told. He doesn’t want to be the only Bee Gee that people know about. It was a collaboration. Each brother brought something to the band, and he wanted to make sure that was known and have the story told with the right people. And I was sensitive to his story, since we kinda come from the same background. There’s a lot of sadness there now, but I think the sun is starting to rise for him.” Gibb, who received a knighthood from Great Britain in 2018, is releasing a new album on Jan. 8, “Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers Songbook,” which features new versions of Bee Gees hits recorded with guest artists.
• Digging into the Bee Gees story, Marshall was most surprised by “their creative process.”
“I expected there to be a lot of time and effort spent in trying to figure out songs and work songs out in those sessions. There was serendipity to everything. I was like, ‘ You probably don’t want to be telling people that you wrote that song (“Stayin’ Alive”) in 10 minutes.’ But it’s one of the great songs of all time, so I guess that works.”
• One thing Marshall did not included in the film was any mention of the 1978 film adaptation of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” a critically panned box office bomb that the Bee Gees co- starred in with Peter Frampton.
“Well, I couldn’t put everything in, and that was just something that they tried that didn’t work. It wasn’t something I feel is important to the journey to get where we had to get. There’s probably a whole movie there, in itself.”