How the ‘Woodstock’ documentary changed the world much more than the festival
“Well, it changed me,” Pete Townshend once mused when assessing the impact of Woodstock, “I hated it.”
The Who guitarist was there with his six-month-old child and found that his coffee was spiked with LSD. So, for him and his band, Woodstock “wasn’t peace and love”, it was carnage and irresponsibility. Likewise, Ravi Shankar was terrified by the unruly crowd. Basically, everyone criticised the sound quality, and while the supposed ‘rampant crime’ has been widely overreported, not everyone was a happy camper, nevertheless.
However, one future star knew he was on the brink of something monumental: Martin Scorsese had been struggling to find his first break in the film industry, but the director Michael Wadleigh was heading into the abyss of 500,000 steaming people, and he knew a youngster would come in handy. So, he hired a fresh-faced and eager Scorsese as his assistant for the Woodstock film.
A hell of a lot hinged on this project. Not only were they planning to capture one of the most pivotal events of modern cultural history, where for a brief moment a festival swelled to such a size that it represented the third biggest city in the state of New York, but the documentarians had also inadvertently become the festival’s major financial hope.
Ironically, the event was largely funded by John Roberts, who happened to be the heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, but he didn’t quite have his hands on his family’s denture money at the time. So, with many panicked bands demanding immediate payment, he sought lofty last-minute bank loans to ensure that the concert could go ahead.
Sadly, he hadn’t invested all that much in security, so many of the 500,00 who wound up attending simply walked in for free. By his own estimation, the festival cost around $3million to put on, and he only recouped around $1.8million of that in gate receipts. In short, he needed the accompanying soundtrack and documentary to be a hit to save his perilously poised bacon.
Thusly, pressure mounted on Scorsese’s young shoulders. Amid hectic conditions, Wadleigh and his inexperienced crew would have to somehow triumph and capture the carnage as it unfurled. Naturally, this also meant a manic editing job awaited them afterwards. Much of this responsibility fell on the shoulders of Thelma Schoonmaker, a young and inexperienced editor.
However, by hook and crook, the four-hour film went on to be a hit that also sealed a ‘Best Documentary’ win at the Oscars, and while Roberts says he was still in debt from the festival right up until 1980, Wadleigh’s work wound up being the major commercial win of the whole chaotic enterprise.
Yet, it was perhaps the act of capturing that chaos that persists as the festival’s abiding influence on pop culture. You can decree it as being the proverbial damp squib of the counterculture movement, a paradigm of its ability to create an uproar but not an impact, but all it took was for one person to be truly inspired by the strange happening amid the half a million strong festering mass to make it worthwhile, and that person turned out to be Scorsese.
While he would admit that his perspective of Woodstock was “limited” given the fact that he was aloft on a platform simply trying to film the acts as best he could without being “knocked off” his elevated viewing station by a jostling mob of unwashed revellers, he would also experience three key things that would go on to define the filmmaking that lay ahead of the ffuture foremost auteur of the modern age.
Firstly, the chaos itself proved to be one hell of a christening experience for young Scorsese. Most movies start out with the potential to be great, but making movies is far from easy, so the process steadily erodes the potential until you’re left with a sham. The best directors avoid that erosion and embellish the script, as Jonah Hill explained when it comes to working with Scorsese, “Imagine if you can make the most complex chess move with no clock.”
“You have four hours to make your move, you’re still a brilliant chess player,” he told Howard Stern. “Now imagine that you make an even better chess move than that brilliant chess player, but you do it in 30 seconds with the clock going.”
“[That’s] what it takes [to be] a brilliant director,” he said. For him, Scorsese was the master of all masters. “I’m talking [about] someone who is a master chess player, a master director. He can fix that problem, it’s advanced problem-solving, in 30 seconds. You literally watch him close his eyes and solve an insanely complex issue… directing is just solving issues constantly.”
For the future Goodfellas director, this became readily apparent from his little platform above The Who. “Every once in a while, I would catch a glimpse of Michael Wadleigh, the director, wielding his camera, headphones askew, trying to stay in touch with the other cameramen by radio microphone,” he recalled in The Sunday Times.
All the same, the young crew seemed to skillfully adapt and adjust, two facets he would display throughout his career from then on. “Mostly, we were getting what we could get, yet, it seems to me, we were curiously (maybe youthfully) confident that we would have something good to take back to New York,” he wrote. Moving forward into his own career, he didn’t want to be confident, he wanted to be certain.
That’s where a good crew comes into things, too. And Scorsese recognised the brilliance in Schoonmaker from the off. Since their impromptu introduction on Woodstock, Scorsese and Schoonmaker have made a whopping 23 films together. Trust, it would seem, is something that Il Maestro knew he’d need moving forward into making movies like Goodfellas and Raging Bull, and he trusted Schoonmaker no end.
But also, if he was going to make original masterpieces that irrevocably changed culture, what he’d need was something that was readily apparent at Woodstock and has proven to be something that has defined Scorsese’s work and, as a result, the entirety of modern filmmaking thereafter. Stood on the podium, underfed and dehydrated, he’d occasionally glance at the crowd and get a snippet of the wonder of it all, but he’d also get a wallop of the madness and misadventure. If the Woodstock film was going to work, it would have to capture both sides, it couldn’t be an airbrushed representation of what never was.
In focusing on the uncompromising yet uncynical warts-and-all depiction of the highs and lows of the festival, the documentarians in Wadleigh’s crew ensured that the event would be enshrined in history. As the Shutter Island icon explained, “I think that without the film, the concert would not be more than a footnote to the social and cultural history of the 1960s – represented by a still photo in a picture book, a line or two in the history books.”
He concludes, “What the movie did, and continues to do, is distil the Woodstock experience, and, more important, keep it vibrant and alive. The footnote has become a touchstone, a way for my generation to remind ourselves of who we were then and to measure the road we have travelled since. It has also been, more significantly, a way for newer generations to get in touch with the chaotic spirit of the 1960s. Or rather, a part of that spirit: the happier part.”
His own movies have equally looked to capture things in an exacting sense, eschewing the ‘happy ever after’ tendency of Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age in favour of something with greater realism, greater grit, and a greater capacity to mount a meaningful “touchstone” that defines a certain time and place, whatever it all meant.
