Amazing Grace—a documentary film about #ArethaFranklin two-night performance January 1972, which turned into one of the best-selling gospel albums of all time—makes its long-awaited debut with screenings at the DOC NYC festival.
Although the 46-year delay was due in part to negotiation issues with Franklin herself, there was another reason entirely that a documentary shot by legendary director #SydneyPollack took so long to appear: The audio wasn’t synced correctly. Which, in 1972, was a catastrophic problem.
“In 1972, even with the most compact 16mm film, you’re dealing with a big reel that goes through a camera slot,” explains Amazing Grace producer Alan Elliott. Back then, film crews used a clapperboard in order to be able to line up video footage with the audio. “You would put a 10-minute film canister on the mag, roll it up, and then clap it at the top, and record all the way for 10 minutes.”
Clapping would presumably have been complicated during a live performance, but Pollack’s cameramen evidently just turned the cameras on and off repeatedly without any sort of time marker; they ended up with thousands of disparate pieces of film, and no sync reference points for any of the shots.
Once they realized that, the original production team hired a lip reader—venerated Inglewood choir director Alexander Hamilton—in an attempt to help the editors get the sync, but after a couple months, they retired the project. According to Elliott, they got 153 minutes out of the 20-plus hours of footage, and that was it.
Elliott himself found out about the footage’s existence in 1990 while working as a staff producer at Atlantic Records. His mentor, Jerry Wexler, mentioned it almost offhandedly. “He said to me, ‘Oh, we filmed Amazing Grace,’” Elliott says. “And I was like, ‘…What?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, it was Sydney something. Pollack?’ And I go, ‘There’s a Sydney Pollack movie of the most famous gospel record ever made and we’ve never seen it?’ ‘Yeah.’”
Elliott and Wexler spoke with Pollack about resurfacing the project. Before he died of pancreatic cancer in 2008, Pollack told the Warner Bros. estate that he wanted Elliott to finish the movie. Elliott bought the rights in 2007, but hadn’t known about the sync issues until the footage arrived on his doorstep.
“When they finally, literally delivered the elements, you could tell that they couldn’t sync up the film,” Elliott says. “In 1990, that’s a problem that’s not fixable; it is fixable in 2008.”
The previous year, Elliott had met two people at Deluxe Laboratories who ended up being instrumental in the footage’s resurrection: Beverly Wood and Gray Ainsworth. When Elliott told Wood that he had his hands on the elements, she offered to digitize them for him. In addition to the film footage, there were the Nagra tapes that accompanied the cameramen around the facility as they shot; plus a set of 16-track 2-inch audio master tapes (Atlantic Records had the other).
The digitization process was complicated by the fact that the tapes had sat in an underground storage facility, untouched, for the better part of 40 years. To get the tapes to the point where their information was transferable, they had to be rebaked—literally put in an oven and heated to about 130 degrees Fahrenheit so that they would cohere correctly to the plastic reels.
Post-transfer, Serge Perron at Deluxe worked to sync audio and video, using Avid software. When he was done, Elliott had around 13 hours’ worth of material out of which to build a documentary. He split the work with Jeff Buchanan, who’d done editing work on Dave Chappelle’s Block Party; between the two of them, it took about 12 weeks of solid work, on Final Cut and Avid, to finish up the editing.
The audio, syncing problems overcome, was given an additional boost when Jimmy Douglass—who mixed Franklin’s original record for Atlantic Records when he was 22 years old—came back to mix Amazing Grace’s audio.
“For me, that was really important for the authenticity of the piece that we had those through lines,” Elliott says. “We’re really blessed to have that authority to follow through. To think about the fact that he mixed the record 46 years ago and just mixed the movie a week and a half ago is pretty incredible.”
Amazing Grace will enter a one-week run in Los Angeles from November 20–27, and another one-week run in Manhattan from December 7–14. Wide release expected in 2019.
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