Thirty years after its initial theatrical release, Wattstax, producer/director Mel Stuart's acclaimed film documenting the seven-hour concert of the same name featuring the artists of Stax Records and held at the LA Coliseum in August 1972, has been restored to its "director's cut" with its never-before-seen original ending. Stuart accompanied the film to the Sundance Film Festival this past January, where it was screened as part of the festival's Sundance Collection.

The road to the restored original version of Wattstax started some five years ago. A clip from the film was screened as part of "Docs Rock," a panel discussion on music documentaries that Andrew O. Thompson and I produced and curated for the Third International Documentary Congress, which was co-sponsored by IDA and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, at the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Fall 1998. The sequence we selected was the concert's climatic scene, in which a young, Afro-hairstyled and dashiki-clad political activist named Jesse Jackson introduced the show's headliner--the Black Moses himself--Isaac Hayes, with a gleaming shaved head and wearing a chain vest. Hayes takes the stage to the introductory vamp to his recent hit, "Theme from Shaft," but then, inexplicably, goes into another song, "Rolling Down a Mountainside."  

During the discussion, Stuart confessed to the evening's host, film critic Elvis Mitchell, that the closing number was actually filmed and recorded on a soundstage several days after the festival, and integrated with footage of the concert audience. This was because he was unable to secure the rights to the music from the film Shaft, then owned by MGM. "It's all a fake," Stuart told the surprised crowd. "But I guess I got away with it." 

In a recent interview, Stuart recalls, "I had shot Issac Hayes doing ‘Shaft' and ‘Soulsville,' but at that point, there was a big fight between Hayes and MGM over publishing rights, and Jim Aubrey [then president of MGM] said I couldn't use the music. I said, ‘But he's the last act, it's the ending to my film. I don't have an ending!'  [Aubrey] said, ‘I don't care.' So I had no alternative but to go on a stage with [cinematographer] John Alonzo and shoot Hayes doing another original song. And no one knew."

A year after the Congress, IDA's then Executive Director Betsy McLane chose the rarely seen Wattstax to screen at the John Anson Ford outdoor amphitheater in Hollywood as part of the "Summer Nights at the Ford" series. The house was packed with fans of the film as well as those who had heard about it but had never seen it. If ever there was a music documentary in need of being restored, remastered and re-released, this was it.

Enter the Fantasy, Inc. label and its sister company, the Saul Zaentz Film Center, both in Berkeley, California. If IDA helped bring attention to this legendary film, it was these companies that took the necessary steps to correct the problems of its past. Fantasy already owned the catalogue of Stax Records, having purchased it back in 1977, over a year after Stax went bankrupt. According to Zaentz's facilities manager, Scott Roberts, who serves as associate producer on the revised film, the impetus to finally restore Wattstax now was threefold. "First, it was the 30th anniversary; second, we realized that there was this lost ending; and third, we found pieces of it in Columbia's vault and were able to reconstruct it," he explains. "It's far superior to the released version, and plays so much better." Stuart, of course, is pleased: "They took my first version of the ending and put it back in the picture, which was fine by me. That was my original cut."

But how did Fantasy and Zaentz overcome the musical rights issues, which prevented "Shaft" and "Soulville" from being included in the first released version? "We got a ‘Get Out of Jail Free' card," muses Roberts. "It turns out there was only a seven-year window on the rights ownership, so we had no problems."

A collaboration between Fantasy and Sony Pictures Entertainment, the restored Wattstax was struck from a high-definition video master and features an audio track completely remastered from the original concert's two-inch 16-track masters into 5.1 Dolby Digital sound. The Zaentz Film Center handled the work on the picture and sound. A limited US theatrical release of the new version of Wattstax is planned for June 6 through Columbia Pictures Repertory.  A  DVD--tentatively to include such supplemental materials as the originally released ending, the theatrical trailer, bluesman Albert King's entire performance at the concert and commentary from Stuart, fellow producer Larry Shaw and executive producer and then Stax Records chief Al Bell--is scheduled to hit shelves in the fall, courtesy of Fantasy.

Tomm Carroll, a freelance writer and editor specializing in the entertainment industry, is an editorial consultant for International Documentary, and serves on its Publications  Committee. He is the former editor and publisher of DGA Magazine.

Sidebar:

The Soulful Expression of the Living Word: Three Decades Later, Mel Stuart Reflects on the Making of ‘Wattstax'

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Wattstax and the imminent theatrical release of the original "director's cut" of the film, International Documentary caught up with its director Mel Stuart (who also produced the film with Larry Shaw; David L. Wolper and Al Bell served as executive producers) to reflect on his landmark film.

International Documentary: How did you, a white filmmaker, come to direct and produce a film about black music and the black community in Watts?

Mel Stuart: David L. Wolper made a deal with Stax Records to do this concert at the Coliseum to celebrate Stax, and the African-American community of Watts, as well as to reflect on the Watts riots. Wolper decided that I should direct and produce the picture. But my caveat was that everybody who was associated with the formation of the picture had to be black. And that's the way it was. I just lived in this community of black artists for six months. We got along fine. Their advice on the shape and style was something I listened to very carefully because I knew that they knew more about that than I did.

ID: So you were accepted into the community?

MS: Yes, they accepted me and thought I was kind of funny. Black and Jewish humor are very similar­­--they're both self-deprecating--and I sort of just fit in. They were kind and sweet and one man, the real philosophical soul of this film, Larry Shaw, was my guide and we became close friends. I didn't turn black, but my thinking changed because this was a world I never really understood from the outside. It was a wonderful experience for me to begin to appreciate and understand the problems and possibilities of being black.

ID: So how did the film come together?

MS: First we shot the concert, then put it together and watched it and I said, "Gentlemen, this is a newsreel of a concert. I don't want to do a concert film. There's something deeper here." So we decided to go out into the streets.

And thank God, some of the artists were not available the day of the concert, so we could shoot their numbers in the neighborhood, which made it much better. Like the Emotions doing a gospel song in the church and Little Milton singing a blues number by the railroad tracks in the shadow of the Watts Towers.

Then I said, we still don't have enough; we're not getting the soul. I think we need to go out into the community, into barbershops, schools and colleges, and see how the people feel about their culture and gospel and jazz and blues and the whole political scene. So we went out and did a host of interviews that really make the picture what it is--to quote Richard Pryor's great line, "a soulful expression of the living word."

ID: Speaking of Richard Pryor, how did he come to be involved?

MS: I thought the film was still missing something, and what I wanted was somebody like the chorus in Shakespeare's Henry V, one voice who tells you what's going on, what's happening on the big scale of the play. And I wanted a comic voice.

Our associate producer Forest Hamilton told me about a guy in this little club down in Watts. I never heard anyone funnier in my life; I realized I was in the presence of a comic genius. We came back the next day to film him at a little bar in the club. I would say to him, "Gospel...blues...men and women...," and he would just go on for 15 minutes off the top of his head about those topics. It was the most exciting, fabulous comic performance I ever saw in my life. He was Richard Pryor and this was his first motion picture appearance. That's what makes up the chorus of the picture and was the cement I needed to hold it together.

The film is really in three parts--the concert, the voice of the people and the voice of Richard Pryor. That's how it came together. They call it the Black Woodstock, and I think it is.

ID: What are the challenges of making a film like Wattstax today?

MS: Some people came to me a couple years ago and asked me to help them redo an updated version of Wattstax. We explored it but it didn't work out. The big challenge is the rights to the performers. Back then, Stax owned the rights to those performers; they all had to show up. You can't do that today. Between the record companies and the rights, you couldn't get them all together without an incredible cost. The audience is there, but just getting the performers together for a big concert is almost insurmountable.

ID: It'd be different socially too, wouldn't it?

MS: Oh, it certainly would. The political spectrum was different in those days. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X had died, but their presence was still there. There are no political leaders for the mass of the black population today. It's a different era.

-TC