Uncle Meat

Uncle Meat (1987)

This is a documentary about an unfinished movie. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention try to film the sci-fi epic "Uncle Meat."

Date of release
1987-01-01
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (7)
Runtime
1h 40m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Frank Zappa

Casting

Interesting facts

Uncle Meat is a 1987 film written and directed by Frank Zappa, released on home video. It was conceived in 1968 as a vehicle for the Mothers of Invention, but remained unfinished until 20 years after the production began.

Production

In 1968 Zappa decided to make a film featuring the original incarnation of the Mothers of Invention. Haskell Wexler, who had used two of Zappa's songs in his film Medium Cool, offered five days of his services as a cinematographer for free to Zappa. The film remained unfinished at the time that the Uncle Meat album was released in April 1969. Financial issues led to the production stopping and Zappa moved on to other projects.

Zappa said in 1983 that he was finally able to resume work on the film for the first time in several years. This was because it had been tied up in a lawsuit. The film had been locked up in a storage vault controlled by "another person", which Zappa did not name. The unnamed person was presumably his former manager Herb Cohen.

A version of the Uncle Meat film was released direct-to-video in 1987. Principal photography having never been completed, the VHS videocassette release is a "making of" documentary showing rehearsals and background footage from 1968 and interviews with people involved with the uncompleted production.

Uncle Meat juxtaposes concert footage from the Festival Hall in London with a fictional narrative that combines elements of science fiction and road stories inspired by the band's sexual escapades. The second plotline serves as a criticism of the music industry, portraying the efforts of a musician to gain commercial success; this plotline is a political thriller.

As in Zappa's previous film, 200 Motels, Uncle Meat explores the separation between documentary and fiction, encouraging the viewer to question whether they are watching real or recreated events. Zappa explores the difficulty of maintaining a career in film as an independent artist outside of the studio system.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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