AMAZING GRACE
Why has the heavenly concert movie ‘Amazing Grace’ been stuck in legal hell for 47 years? Mick Brown reports
The film Aretha Franklin didn’t want you to see
It might seem odd to suggest that the most enthralling film you are likely to see this year is not a thriller, a love story or the latest CGI blockbuster, but a documentary filmed 47 years ago in a small Los Angeles church, which has been sitting on a shelf more or less since the day it was made. But not so odd, perhaps, when you consider the subject of the film is Aretha Franklin.
Thrilling, transcendent, “the closest thing to witnessing a miracle…”, it is a film that has already had critics grasping for superlatives, and will leave you grasping for more.
Amazing Grace is a film of the two days in January 1972 that Aretha Franklin spent at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church recording the gospel album of the same name. On hand to film the proceedings was the Academy Award winning director Sydney Pollack. Over the course of two days Pollack’s cameramen shot more than 14 hours of film. Yet, due to a technical error, and the obduracy of Franklin herself, the film was never to see the light of day, until now.
Aretha Franklin was at the peak of her popularity in 1972. Working with the producer Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records, she had enjoyed a run of hits, beginning in 1967 with I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You), and continuing with (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, Think, Respect and I Say a Little Prayer.
It was Wexler’s idea to take Franklin back to her church roots, performing the traditional gospel songs that she had grown up singing in her father, the Rev CL Franklin’s, church in Detroit, recruiting the Rev James Cleveland – a family friend – as musical director, along with his southern California Community Choir and the rhythm section that played on all Aretha’s records.
Amazing Grace eschews any of the conventional devices of the music documentary. There is no introduction, no commentary, no talking heads. The camerawork is often shaky, the production unvarnished. What we are witnessing is simply Aretha in excelsis, consumed by spirit, her voice soaring, moaning, and exalting, a holy fire igniting the
choir behind her and the congregation in the pews.
This is church – but it’s not a service; it’s a recording session. We see the false starts, the longueurs while microphones are being rearranged – Franklin, a contained, tightly wound, unsmiling figure, as if momentarily brought back to earth and preserving her energies to soar heavenwards once more. Hovering at the back of the church we glimpse Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, who were in Los Angeles at the time, completing the recording of Exile On Main Street – shaking their heads in disbelief at the intensity of what they’re witnessing.
On the second night of recording, we see the arrival of Aretha’s father, a million-dollar preacher in a cobaltblue silk suit, along with the gospel singer, Clara Ward. The resonances ricochet: Ward was the great stylistic influence and model for the young Aretha. She was also CL Franklin’s lover (one of many); it was their affair that led to Aretha’s mother leaving her husband when Aretha was six, which was to have such a devastating effect on her life. At one point CL Franklin steps forward to tenderly wipe the sweat from his daughter’s brow – a gesture of paternal affection, but also a piece of stylised showmanship refined over the years on the gospel circuit.
Quite why Amazing Grace should have remained unseen for so long – and how it was brought back to life – is a remarkable story of incompetence and, too, of the perseverance of its producer, Alan Elliott, in salvaging a project given up for dead.
In the early Nineties, Elliott was working as a staff producer at Atlantic when he met Jerry Wexler. Elliott was just seven at the time of the recording of Amazing Grace, but enthused to Wexler that it was one of his favourite albums. “You know we made a film of that?” Wexler said. Elliott didn’t know, but the seeds of an obsession were sown.
What had sabotaged Amazing Grace in the first instance was a mistake so rudimentary that it’s still hard to believe anybody could have made it.
For all the preparation that went into the film, nobody seemed to have remembered to bring a clapperboard – the device that marks the beginning and end of a segment of film, and which enables it to be synchronised to the sound recording.
“They had four or five cameras shooting 14 hours of film,” Elliott says. “The cameramen are moving all around; there’s a lot of energy to their pictures, which is terrific – but the bad news is nobody could sync it for 30 years.”
The problem might have been avoided had Amazing Grace been filmed by the man originally slated to direct it, James Signorelli, who had experience shooting live music as the cinematographer on Super Fly, where he had matched dialogue in the film to a performance by Curtis Mayfield. But Signorelli was passed over for the much more famous name of Pollack.
“I have a vague memory of sidling up to one of the cameramen during the filming and asking, ‘How are you syncing this up with the recording Atlantic is making?’” says record producer Joe Boyd. “Then a week after the event I got a call from the editor saying, ‘we got a problem; there’s no sync marks’.”
When Elliott secured the rights to the film in 2007, he hired a team of editors who used digital technology to finally synchronise the sound and pictures. He then began the process of shaping and cutting.
And that’s when the second problem began – a 10-year legal battle with Franklin herself to allow the film to be shown, that would only be resolved on the singer’s death. “In the comedy-tragedy department,” Elliott says, “it’s a movie that cost $100,000 to make and $3million in legal expenses.” Aretha Franklin, “Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows” as Wexler once described her, could be a difficult woman – complex, damaged and as unfathomable as she was brilliant. Quite why she should have objected to Amazing Grace being shown remains something of a mystery. Joe Boyd believes the reasons were partly financial.
“Aretha’s attitude was, sure – give me a bunch of money and you can put it out,” he says. “But music documentaries don’t generally generate the amount of money she was asking for.”
In 2011, Franklin sued Elliott, contending he did not have the right to use her name and image. The case was settled out of court. But the film remained in the vaults. Four years later, as the legal wrangling continued, Franklin told the Detroit Free Press: “It isn’t that I’m not happy about the film, because I love the film itself. It’s just that – well, legally, I really should just not talk about it, because there are problems.” She never made clear what those problems were.
Eventually, Elliott was introduced to Sabrina Owens, Franklin’s niece, who would later become the executor of the singer’s estate. “At a certain point in our friendship, she told me that Aretha had pancreatic cancer and had had it for five years,” Elliott says.
‘Mick Jagger is seen shaking his head at the intensity of what he’s witnessed’
‘Music documentaries don’t generally generate the amount of money Aretha was asking for’
“From what Sabrina described, the last few years were very hard physically on Aretha. And I realised that all the work I’d done up to that point was actually a giant eulogy to the Queen of Soul, and there was nothing to do except wait until she passed.”
When Franklin died in August last year, Owens invited Elliott to the funeral, and two weeks later he screened the film for her family and friends, who were seeing it for the first time. The response, Elliott says, was “jubilant”, and all obstacles to the film being released melted away.
For Elliott, Franklin’s performance in Amazing Grace is “her crowning achievement” – a sentiment echoed by Joe Boyd.
“This was such an important thing for her, at the height of her fame to go back to the music that formed her aesthetic and her whole way of singing and pay homage to her dad,” he says. “She knew what she had to bring forth, and she did.” Amen to that.