Monterey Pop

Monterey Pop (1968)

Do you know where your kids are hanging out tonight?

Featuring performances by popular artists of the 1960s, this concert film highlights the music of the 1967 California festival. Although not all musicians who performed at the Monterey Pop Festival are on film, some of the notable acts include the Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, Otis Redding, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix's post-performance antics -- lighting a guitar on fire, breaking it and tossing a part into the audience -- are captured.

Date of release
1968-12-26
TMDB
7.4 / 10 (102)
Runtime
1h 20m
Genres
Music, Documentary
Director
D. A. Pennebaker

Casting

Interesting facts

Monterey Pop is a 1968 American concert film by D. A. Pennebaker that documents the Monterey International Pop Festival of 1967. Among Pennebaker's several camera operators were fellow documentarians Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles. The painter Brice Marden has an "assistant camera" credit. Titles for the film were by the illustrator Tomi Ungerer. Featured performers include Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Hugh Masekela, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, the Mamas & the Papas, the Who, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, whose namesake set his guitar on fire, broke it on the stage, then threw the neck of his guitar in the crowd at the end of "Wild Thing".

Production

The American Broadcasting Company put up a $200,000 advance to get a film made about the Monterey Pop Festival for its new ABC Movie of the Week series. However, Monterey Pop never aired on ABC, a decision made by Thomas W. Moore, the head of ABC at the time and, according to Lou Adler, "a very conservative Southern gentleman". "We showed him Jimi Hendrix fornicating with his amp and we said 'What do you think?' " Adler recalls.

Monterey Pop was shot on 16mm film blown up to 35mm for theatrical release. Director D. A. Pennebaker said he recorded the audio on a professional 8-channel reel-to-reel recorder borrowed from the Beach Boys. The movie's theatrical release used a four-channel soundtrack that included two to three minutes of rudimentary surround sound. Dolby noise reduction was added in 1978 when fresh prints of the film were struck.

After Leacock-Pennebaker, the original production company, was dissolved in 1970, Pennebaker Associates acquired rights to the film.

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

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