'The Music Never Stopped': What if You Were Stuck in the 1960s? - Speakeasy
By Michelle Kung Based on Dr. Oliver Sacks’ case-study essay “The Last Hippie,” writer/director Jim Kohlberg’s drama “The Music Never Stopped” — currently showing at the Sundance Film Festival and opening nationwide in March — stars J.K. Simmons as the father of Gabriel Sawyer, a Grateful Dead-loving child of the 1960s. After suffering a cerebral trauma, Gabriel (played by Lou Taylor Pucci) loses his ability to form new memories and can only be brought back by replaying the hits of the 1960s, including songs by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, and of course, the Dead. Given the importance of music to Gabriel’s reawakening, Kohlberg knew that unless he could secure the rights to all the songs that moved his hippie protagonist, he didn’t have film. “I frankly loved the script but initially knew that the chances of making it were exceptionally low,” he said. “I wasn’t going to do it without the Dead or Dylan.” To help jump his musical hurdle, he hired Sue Jacobs as his music producer/supervisor to help keep his budget management. To his surprise, Dylan signed on quickly, as did the Grateful Dead. In total, the film ended up securing three Dylan songs, four Grateful Dead songs, two Beatles song and three Buffalo Springfield songs. “By far, getting the music was the hardest part of the production and I never really thought we would get it done,” said Kohlberg. “I really didn’t. I was amazed I had overcome my self-imposed hurdle.” We recently caught up with Kohlberg about this making of his film. The Wall Street Journal: As both a producer and director on this film, how did you first come across the material? Jim Kohlberg: A friend of mine gave it to me and as soon as I read the script I knew I wanted to do it. The script was written 13 years ago and it was in Sony turnaround. So I had to negotiate with Sony for six months just to get it out of that turnaround hell. Next, we got the other producers on board and put the cast together, and then the money came together. Getting Dylan and The Dead on board was really key. I owe them a huge thanks and gratitude. I loved seeing J.K. Simmons in a lead role, after so many years playing character parts. He did an incredible job. It is his first real lead and I’m hoping that the critics pick up on him as the next kind of Richard Jenkins. He’s a delight to work with. I will tell you just an anecdote. [Spoiler Alert] You know the scene where he is walking down the hall after he hugs his kid? We fade to black and to an experienced moviegoer you know he’s dying. He was so in character that he was crying when he was walking down the hallway even though his back was to the camera. That’s the kind of actor he is. Why did you choose this project to make your film directorial debut? I had directed theater, so had been looking for a film project for a while. For a first feature, I didn’t think I wanted to take on lots of action. It had to be small and it had to be an incredibly good script. And I had to relate to it. I had actually been reading all these brain books for four or five years. Not just Oliver’s books, but some of the Nobel Prize winners who had gotten the prize for understanding cellularly how the brain functions and how synapses are strengthened or weakened by the amount of use they get. When it came along and the story hit the science and music parts of it, I knew. Plus, it was a universal story about a father and a son in a time period where it was probably the greatest generation gap in several centuries or generations. How involved was Oliver Sacks with the film? Obviously, he allowed us to use the material because we did have to get his permission. And he was wonderful. His health has been fragile. But he came for the film’s big concert scene. He wrote me a note a couple of weeks ago at Christmas about how proud he was of the film and how glad he was that we were in Sundance. Speaking of the concert scene, how did you manage to stage a big historical crowd scene on an indie film budget? That was one that kept me up nights, believe me. What was funny was I got some not very backhanded compliments. One guy who was a Dead Head asked me, after he had seen the footage, how did you cut in all of the Dead footage in with the actors that were on stage? And I told him we didn’t use any Dead footage. Another kind of compliment was that The Dead themselves were so uncomfortable with [the film-version of] Jerry Garcia’s close-ups that they asked us to pull them out because they were too Jerry-like. The guy we had to play Jerry wasn’t even a full-time actor. He’s a math teacher in Brooklyn who we put in a Jerry wig and he looks so close to him. Given that the characters age quite a bit onscreen, did you guys have to debate whether you wanted to cast Gabe young and then age him up, or if you wanted to cast older and use makeup to make him younger? Yes, we had endless discussions about it, as you can imagine. One of the great things about Lou was that he was 25-ish but actually he could look 17. And t hen we put a bunch of make-up and a beard on him that really got him looking 35. In many ways, Lou had the most difficult part. What I tried to help him with was the divide between the different consciousness states that Gabriel went into. We came up with four or five different states of consciousness, so we would have a common language and definition of where he should be and when. How much character discussion did you have with the actors? Coming from the theater, I wanted two weeks of rehearsal and everyone laughed at me. I ended up getting everybody for four or five days, everybody but J.K. We did a tabletop reading with the whole cast, even the minor parts. I spent a fair amount of time with Julia Ormond. She digs into a part almost like a director does in terms of understanding every motivation and every line. The only thing with her is there were moments where she had to be stiffer and tougher. So a number of times I just had to make her behave a little bit meaner. A director’s job is just to make adjustments only when you need to. The best thing is for the actor to get there by himself. We then did two-three days rehearsal. Then, believe it or not, the producers had scheduled a big fight scene for the first day of shooting. As a director, I was completely terrified. If that scene didn’t work, the film would fail. So the smartest thing, in hindsight, that I did was take Lou and Cara [Seymour] and JK up to that actual house and we blocked it and we rehearsed it in the house with no cameras for three or four hours and just made that scene sing. And then the next Monday I didn’t have to completely freak out—because I probably would have. It is kind of incredible that you did that scene first. I begged them. I kept begging the other producers, don’t do it on the first day. But they told me to tear off the band-aid and all this other stuff. It worked out. -- http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/01/22/what-if-you-were-stuck-in-the-1960s/ Via InstaFetch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. 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