White Rock

White Rock (1977)

British documentary filmmaker and producer Tony Maylam reinvigorated the sports documentary genre with WHITE ROCK, an idiosyncratic and utterly engaging account of the XII Olympic Winter Games Innsbruck 1976. He did so by placing music (by organ and synth wunderkind Rick Wakeman) front and center, and by using Hollywood star James Coburn as a "guide for the uninitiated."

Date of release
1977-01-29
TMDB
5.4 / 10 (7)
Runtime
1h 16m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Tony Maylam
Collection
100 Years of Olympic Films: 1912–2012

Casting

Interesting facts

White Rock is a 1977 British documentary film about the 1976 Winter Olympics held in Innsbruck, Austria. The film was narrated by James Coburn, and directed by Tony Maylam. The film was nominated in 1977 for the Robert Flaherty Award by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. A soundtrack album, White Rock was released by Rick Wakeman in 1977 and it entered the UK Albums Chart on 12 February 1977, where it spent 9 weeks and reached number 14.

Production and release

Michael Samuelson was given the chance to make the 1976 Winter Olympics film, and he contacted Tony Maylam to direct and write the film. However, they felt that only two films had "worked". Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl of the 1936 Summer Olympics held in Berlin and the Kon Ichikawa film Tokyo Olympiad of the 1964 Summer Olympics held in Tokyo. They decided that they did not want the film to be a documentary, but a feature film.

We came up with the concept of dealing with just six events - with each having its own theme and being representative of a particular sport. For example, among the Alpine sports, we've really gone all-out for the Men's Downhill - which is the glamorous, prestigious event rather than including the Ladies' Downhill, the Men's Slalom or the Men's Giant Slalom, events which the average viewer knows nothing about.

Tony Maylam made two music movies White Rock and Genesis: In Concert, also known as the Genesis Concert Movie, which is a movie shot in concert at The Apollo Theatre, Glasgow and the New Bingley Hall, Stafford with the rock group Genesis. They were screened together as a double bill. Rock promoters Harvey Weinstein and Bob Weinstein purchased the films for the US market and distributed them as Sensasia.

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

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