How's this for a pitch: A music doc about a guy who's not a musician, directed by a guy who's never done a music doc before and isn't really a fan of the genre, or of pop music in general? Strange as it may seem, the acclaimed new documentary Mayor of the Sunset Strip is the film that fits that description. 

The life, times and many famous friends and acquaintances of legendary Los Angeles disc jockey Rodney "on the ROQ" Bingenheimer, a Hollywood fixture since the mid-1960s, are captured in this film by award-winning documentarian (Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse) as well as feature filmmaker (The Man from Elysian Fields) George Hickenlooper. No straightforward ROQumentary, Hickenlooper's portrait not only depicts through archival footage its celebrity-obsessed subject's many Forrest Gump-like moments with nearly 40 years worth of hip rock 'n' roll's next big things, but also reveals in vérité reality several personal and psyche-defining moments of Bingenheimer's relationships with his few close friends and family members.

Documentary spoke with the filmmaker about Mayor of the Sunset Strip and the somewhat unorthodox approach he took in documenting the fabulous life of the no-longer-almost-famous KROQ DJ.

Documentary: How did you come to be involved in Mayor of the Sunset Strip? Did you know Rodney already?

George Hickenlooper: I was approached by Chris Carter [the producer and a close friend of Rodney's]. He had seen Hearts of Darkness. But I was initially on the fence about doing the film. 
I knew who Rodney was from college; my roommate at Yale had recorded his radio show and would play it in our room. So I knew his un-prepossessing, high-pitched voice. It piqued my interest because it was so unlike the chocolately timbres of other FM disc jockeys. I was curious to meet him, but a little dubious about whether I wanted to do a feature-length documentary about a DJ.

D: What changed your mind?

GH: When I met Rodney and went to his apartment to see the amazing collection of Zelig-like photos of himself with all these celebrities, and saw how luminous he became when he talked about these photos and gold records and memorabilia, it really struck a chord with me. I saw a much more universal story. Here was a guy who hadn't made really interesting contributions to music, but who was deeply touched and affected by the phenomenon of celebrity. 

D: Why did that aspect of him appeal to you?

GH: In a way Rodney is an everyman; he not only reminded me a little of myself--my own fascination with celebrity and why I came to Hollywood--but I think he represents a lot of people in the sense that we all have a certain fascination with celebrity and fame.  In the last 30 years we've all become obsessed with fame--reality television and shows about entertainment. We've sort of crossed that Paddy Chayevsky-an line where news has merged into entertainment because of this obsession. 
At the risk of sounding ostentatious, I saw Rodney as a metaphor for what's happened to our culture. He comes from a broken home; I also share that with him. A lot of people who come to Hollywood who Rodney has helped are looking to find something that they never got at home as children. I think our whole culture has become very sick and dysfunctional and turns to celebrity and fame as a drug to numb that internal pain.

D: Since you didn't really know him, how did you find him to work with?

GH: He was really easy to get along with. I think Rodney feels overlooked a little bit, feels that his life is interesting and should be chronicled in some way and I think he was happy to have me do that; I think he respected me, the filmmaker. But overall, I think the bottom line is that Rodney has very few friends; he's very protective of whom he shares friendship with. Intimacy is very difficult in this town; relationships aren't really built on true love, they're built on...greed, often.

D: You had never done a music documentary before. How did you approach it?  Did you have a classic music doc in mind as an inspiration?

GH: I haven't really seen that many music documentaries. I'm not particularly a big music doc fan. One inspiration was Terry Zwigoff's Crumb. While they're obviously very different people, there were certain similarities between Rodney's relationships with his closest friends and Crumb with his two brothers. That kind of family dynamic that I found so fascinating in Crumb I thought was analogous to Rodney's life too.

D: Are you a fan of pop music at all?

GH: I don't know a lot about pop music, which is why I think I was a great choice to make Mayor of the Sunset Strip. It would've been easy to make it a film for people who stand in line for 24 hours to get tickets to see Limp Bizkit; and that's great, those kind of docs should be made. But I was more interested in trying to reach a much larger audience, so I was looking at Rodney's life on a more visceral level and thematic scale. Ultimately the main theme I came up with is that celebrity is an extension of our need to be loved. In this hyperbolic culture we live in, that's how we've been conditioned to find love when we haven't been able to get it on a personal level.

D: What were the challenges of trying to distill four decades of rock 'n' roll down to 90 minutes?

GH: It was a huge challenge. My editor Julie Janata and I had to cull through about 100 hours that I had shot, another 10 hours that Chris had shot before I got involved, at least 50 hours of music videos and documentaries that were directly related to Rodney or peripherally related to Hollywood, and about 30 hours of radio shows that Rodney had recorded over his career. He was the most well-documented individual I had met in my life.

D: How long was your first cut?

GH: Our first selected assemblage was at about 12 hours! Julie cut it down to about six hours, and we ultimately got it down to about 2:15, which I thought was the locked cut. I showed it to some people whose opinions I really respect and they felt it was a little long in the middle, so we finally cut it down to 93 minutes.

D: Were there any clips that you couldn't get?

GH: No, we got everything we wanted. That was the real gamble in making this film. Here is Rodney, who I now know has had this sweeping influence on alternative music and the Hollywood scene. But when I started the project, I didn't know how much of that was really true. I didn't know what kind of access I was going to have to David Bowie or Courtney Love or Cher...The real danger was that I was going to make a film about a DJ and have no access to the stars and wouldn't be able to license their music, so ultimately it'd be a film about a guy who lives in a small room who had a career in music, but I'd have no music to play.
Chris and I just decided to make the film we wanted to make and hope that the pieces would eventually fall into place, and they did. Bowie was the first one to grant us an interview, and once that happened, the floodgates opened; we were able to license any clip we wanted, and every single piece of music we chose we got, including Led Zeppelin. It just goes to show how much these artists really do respect him. There are 66 cues in the movie!

D: The film seems part biopic and part vérité; is that what you intended or did it just sort of happen that way?

GH: It kind of happened that way. People have said it's a weird documentary because it feels like a fictional film; it's so absorbing that you're swept into it like a movie. And that has to do with the cinéma vérité aspects of it. It was the most laborious, ambitious and challenging film I ever worked on­­--simply because I was trying to balance these larger themes with a very personal story and at the same time integrate that into this incredible career and achievement in music.

D: How did you approach shooting thevérité aspects?

GH: My production company is Kino-Eye American, which is an homage to Dziga Vertov, and that sort of Russian school of documentary filmmaking in the 1920s--this idea that you let life just unfold in front of the camera. I was trying to take this same approach with the film, not trying to force my ideas onto Rodney, but to allow his life to unfold...which ultimately resulted in these very personal moments. Rodney brought me to his parents' house; he wanted me to see his parents and felt that he needed to show me how much his father really loves him, which he really believes. And I think that's why the cinéma vérité feels so strong--because I didn't create these situations with real people, I allowed them to happen.

D: You've directed both fiction and nonfiction films. How are they different for you?

GH: I really love documentary filmmaking. Fictional filmmaking is built on the tradition of theater and art history and Aristotle's Poetics. Documentaries are what make cinema a very unique art form because you're grabbing random images, random ideas out of the air and creating meaning and story by juxtaposing images you've grabbed out of pure chaos. And that's what makes documentary filmmaking cinema in its purest form--because it's not really based on any other tradition. It's simply cinema for cinema's sake.

Tomm Carroll, a freelance writer and editor specializing in the entertainment industry, is editor of Editors Guild magazine and director of publications at the Editors Guild. He is also editorial consultant for Documentary and former editor and publisher of DGA Magazine.