Aretha gospel film has release date decades after its filming

LOS ANGELES — One of Hollywood’s holy grails, Amazing Grace, capturing what is considered to be Aretha Franklin’s most transcendent gospel performance, is headed to theaters 46 years after it was filmed.

“Her fans need to see this film, which is so pure and so joyous,” Sabrina Owens, Franklin’s niece and the executor of the Franklin estate, said in an interview.

Freed from legal entanglements — Franklin, who died in August, sued repeatedly to block its release — Amazing Grace will have its world premiere next Monday in New York at Doc NYC, a festival dedicated to nonfiction cinema. To qualify for the 2019 Academy Awards, the 87-minute film will then receive one-week runs in Los Angeles in November and in New York in December. Alan Elliott, one of the film’s producers, said Amazing Grace would likely arrive in wide release in January.

Amazing Grace is one of the most famous films never released. It was shot by Sydney Pollack over two nights in 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles as Franklin recorded an album that would become one of the bestselling gospel records of all time.

Anchored by an 11-minute version of Amazing Grace, the record includes definitive interpretations of songs like Mary Don’t You Weep, a slavery-era spiritual. The Rev. James Cleveland, the pioneering gospel singer, was on hand to introduce Franklin. Mick Jagger sat in a pew toward the back.

But the film recording was mishandled. Pollack, who died in 2008, failed to use clapper boards, a crucial tool in matching sound with filmed images in a predigital era.

Frustrated film editors at Warner Bros., which financed the shoot, ultimately gave up, having missed the 1972 release of the “Amazing Grace” album. The Amazing Grace negatives began to gather dust in the Warner vaults.

Elliott, who had been obsessed with the lost footage, persuaded Warner to sell him the reels in 2007. By 2010, digital technology had evolved to a point that syncing film and sound was finally possible.

As a planned release date approached in 2011, however, Franklin sued Elliott for using her likeness without her permission. That started years of legal wrangling, with Franklin blocking Elliott and the Telluride Film Festival from showing Amazing Grace in 2015 and 2016. The singer’s opposition appeared not to have anything to do with the film’s content, which she had said publicly that she “loved.”