Real life of a rock legend
BILL & TED’S ALEX WINTER HAS UNEARTHED ARCHIVAL GOLD IN A FRANK ZAPPA DOCUMENTARY THAT PULLS NO PUNCHES
Countless filmmakers and fanboys had sought permission from Frank Zappa’s family over the past 27 years since his death to make a documentary of his life. It wouldn’t be until Alex Winter — yes, of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure fame — made his pitch in 2015 that the family would finally grant access to the extraordinary archives of the composer, activist and avant-garde provocateur.
The former child actor, who returned to his most loved character Bill S. Preston Esq, alongside Keanu Reeves in last year’s acclaimed Bill & Ted Face the Music, has spent most of the past decade building an impressive resume as a documentarian, writing and directing films on subjects as varied as the dark web and children in showbiz.
What Winter found in the dusty and dark corridors of Zappa’s enormous vault underneath the famous Zappa family home in Laurel Canyon — stretching back to his teen years as an aspiring film editor and through his prolific professional life — was mind-blowing in its volume.
“I don’t even think including the family, to a certain degree, knew how much was down there. And they knew there was a lot down there as they had really spent a lot of time over the years very carefully preserving musical recordings and things like that,” Winter says.
“But there was just shelves and shelves and shelves of eight millimetre and Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm and in every conceivable format of video. It was overwhelming, but it was also very exciting, because of the possibility we were going to be able to tell the story to some degree from his perspective and really get into the interior life that he had kept quite guarded from the public.”
The home movies of Zappa with his wife Gail and his children Moon,
Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva reveal much of that guarded private life. Some of it is uncomfortable viewing. Gail, who looked after the Zappa estate until her death in 2015, was interviewed for the film and addresses his unapologetic infidelity on the road while she took care of business and the children.
In one old interview cut into the doco, the musician admits he caught a sexually transmitted disease on tour and sent his wife to fill the prescription to treat them both.
“The first time I met her (Gail) — I didn’t know she was going to say yes to making a film — and I said I didn’t want to make a narrow-minded film; I wanted to get into the aspects of his personality that were challenging. The sexism, the somewhat authoritarian way he dealt with his band and why he
created enemies as much as he created devotees,” Winter says.
“She did talk about that but she knew I admired him and it wasn’t going to be a take-down. It was important to look at the full weight of … the hypocrisies of the sexual revolution that were primarily skewed towards the male and who suffered the consequences of that. Zappa gave us some fantastic sound bites which exemplified what that mindset was.”
Zappa’s creative genius, from rock’n’roll to jazz, pop and orchestra, from the ‘60s to the ‘90s, has inspired obsessive examination of his gargantuan catalogue of 62 records made during his life and another 50 posthumous albums released since 1994 by the Zappa Family Trust.
Winter knew Zappa was a complicated man who didn’t do drugs despite their proliferation in rock in the ‘60s and ‘70s and was an
outspoken critic of mainstream education and censorship, having been jailed himself for his early work.
The director says his deep dive into the film archives uncovered surprising insights into Zappa’s endeavours as a concerned citizen of the world who advocated for free speech and urged more people to vote and get involved in the political process.
One of the musician’s final concerts in 1991, before he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 52, was in Prague to celebrate the liberation of the Czech Republic.
Winter says: “We found all this footage of him going to Moscow and different countries in Europe and meeting all these people. I didn’t know any of that. I don’t think the family really knew. There were hours and hours of film of him meeting pundits and other people, even at his home, discussing kind of where the
world was going and how to possibly get it onto a better track.”
There is of course also great home footage of the stream of music superstars, particularly British rock musicians, and counterculture figures seeking an audience with Zappa at that Laurel Canyon home
“He was at the forefront of the Laurel Canyon movement in LA, he was one of the first rock artists to become independent and to really fight for artists rights to have a clear eyed understanding of how bad the landscape was for artists, even in the 60s. He and Gail, their house was like a like a salon, like you would find in Paris in the 1920s. It was the absolute epicentre of culture and they were both incredibly bright and very plugged in and very tuned into art beyond just what they were doing. So it was a really great place to be.”