Jimmy Page to present Led Zeppelin doc at Venice Film Festival
Guitarist Jimmy Page says he turned down a lot of “pretty miserable” pitches over the years to make a documentary about Led Zeppelin. But he finally bit when he received a deeply-researched proposal focusing almost exclusively on the music and chronicling the band’s birth in 1968 and its meteoric early rise.
The result is “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” one of the most eagerly anticipated documentaries at the Venice Film Festival, which made its premiere Saturday with Page on the red carpet.
Producers Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty — avowed Zeppelin fans — obtained never-before-seen footage of some of the band’s early U.S. and British concerts as well as an astonishing audio interview that drummer John Bonham gave to an Australian journalist before he died in 1980.
The interview, concert footage and other archive material are spliced into contemporary interviews with the three surviving band members — Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones — to create a montage that maps the frenetic first two years of the band’s existence and its early musical influences.
MacMahon, who along with McGourty launched the PBS “American Epic” documentary series, said it took a year to locate the Bonham recording, after hearing a bootleg version of the interview on a vinyl record. From the sound, he knew that it had been converted into a quarterinch tape. He then “went to every Australian journalist that we knew from that era saying do you recognize this voice? Because the journalist doesn’t identify himself.”
“Eventually I tracked down someone who said, ‘We know who it was but he died.’ ”
MacMahon then drew on previous contacts he had with a sound archive in Canberra, Australia, which went through “30,000 unmarked reels” to find the one with the interview. Page said he had received plenty of proposals over the years to tell Led Zeppelin’s story, but “they were pretty miserable.”
“This one, it’s everything about the music, and what made the music tick,” he said. “It’s not just a sample of it with a talking head. This is something in a totally different genre.”