PAGE AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL FOR LED ZEPPELIN DOCUMENTARY
VENICE, ITALY» 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 neverbefore-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 archival 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.
He went to similar lengths to get full concert recordings of the songs as performed, sometimes finding reels of uncut songs that had never before been seen. He said he went to such lengths because he wanted the film essentially to be a musical interspersed with interviews.
The songs are played at fulllength, not just snippets. And it lets the band members tell their own story in their own words.