The Grateful Dead Movie (1977)

Interesting facts

The Grateful Dead Movie, released in 1977 and directed by Jerry Garcia and Leon Gast, is a film that captures live performances from rock band the Grateful Dead during an October 1974 five-night run at Winterland in San Francisco. These concerts marked the beginning of a hiatus, with the October 20, 1974, show billed as "The Last One". The band would return to touring in 1976. The film features the "Wall of Sound" concert sound system that the Dead used for all of 1974. The movie also portrays the burgeoning Deadhead scene. Two albums have been released in conjunction with the film and the concert run: Steal Your Face and The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack.

Production

When it became apparent that Garcia wanted to oversee all aspects of post-production, Gast excused himself from the project. Though unfamiliar with the band, Susan Crutcher was hired as an additional film editor (with Emily Craig as an assistant). Crutcher said "When I came on they had about 100,000 feet of film to sync up. That alone took five months.

Garcia worked on the editing, assembly and synchronization for nearly three years. Those that knew the guitarist at the time say he was consumed by the completion of the project and highly stressed. Garcia called the process "two years of incredible doubt, crisis after crisis." Bassist Phil Lesh explained "I don’t think Jer had any idea at the beginning how much mind-numbing repetitive detail he would have to wade through just to storyboard the f…

The opening animation sequence cost approximately as much as the rest of the movie, which together brought the Grateful Dead organization to the brink of bankruptcy, threatening the band's own record label and requiring the accumulation of more debt.

Rather than make dozens of prints of the film and distribute it through normal outlets, the movie was toured city-to-city, to control quality. According to Lesh, "Wishing to present the movie as a concert experience, Jerry enlisted one of our concert promoters to rent theaters (a process called “four-walling”) and bring in special sound systems to enhance the sound quality. (This was before the era of universal multitrack movie sound)."

The movie was premiered June 1, 1977, at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City. After an initial multi-city tour, prints were made and the film occasionally appeared in theaters as a midnight movie. Because the Grateful Dead had returned to touring by the time the film was released, its original purpose had been lost.

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