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Gary Dretzka

By Gary Dretzka Dretzka@moviecitynews.com

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte Finds Some Soul Power

Nostalgia dictates that everything that came before not only is grander than what is currently in vogue, but, in all likelihood, what is yet to come. Nowhere is this belief more firmly entrenched than among sports fans and music lovers.

No matter how much money HBO and Showtime pour into the promotion of title fights in boxing’s lower weight brackets, old-timers will continue to insist they’re no match for the excitement of a heavyweight championship. And, they’re probably right. After Mike Tyson lost the crown, however, the division turned into a geography lesson, with the sport’s leading lights emerging from countries once hidden behind the Iron Curtain.

Likewise, promoters of rock music have unsuccessfully tried to reproduce the magic of Woodstock ever since the mud dried in the back 40 of Max Yasgur’s farm. If the fences hadn’t been breached, and it hadn’t been declared a “free concert,” Woodstock might simply be remembered today for causing New York’s largest and most peaceful traffic jam. Today, people don’t think twice about paying exorbitant prices – even before service charges — for concert tickets.

In 1996, the Academy Award-winning documentary, When We Were Kings, reminded us of the unprecedented build-up to the epochal 1974 match pitting Muhammad Ali andGeorge Foreman for the heavyweight title. The fight was front-page news in sports sections around the world for months, if only because a postponement kept sportswriters in Zaire for six weeks longer than anyone anticipated. Ali’s stunning victory over the heavily favored Foreman would be memorialized in print by Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, and on the screen by Michael Mann’s 2001 biopic, Ali. Overnight, the previously unknown defensive strategy, “rope-a-dope,” became a household word.

How many people today can recall anything about the “black Woodstock” music festival that was staged in Kinshasa to coincide with the “Rumble in the Jungle”? Not many. The three-night event, Zaire ’74, attempted nothing less than to bring the most popular soul and R&B acts in the United States together with the most important groups in Zaire and black Africa. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s exuberant documentary, Soul Power—winner of theAudience Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival — captures the excitement generated during those 12 hours of music.

Arriving as it does, nearly 35 years after Rumble in the Jungle and Zaire ’74 — and another 13 years after When We Were Kings — Soul Power is testament to the conviction of a group of filmmakers to complete the historical record on the fight. For his part, Levy-Hinte simply was carrying the baton handed to him by Leon Gast, director ofWhen We Were Kings. Gast was there, in Kinshasa, alongside festival promotersStewart Levine, Don King and Hugh Masekela. The raw material Levy-Hinte would craft was provided by such luminaries Albert Maysles, Kevin Keating and Roderick Young.

Along with Gast, Taylor Hackford and Keith Robinson, Levy-Hinte edited When We Were Kings. The completion of that documentary was delayed because the negative and rights to the film were entangled in civil suits involving its Liberian financiers. (The fight itself was funded by Zaire’s dictatorial president, Mobutu Sese Seko, but that’s another story.)

Levy-Hinte had become obsessed with the idea of making a concert film after seeing all of the great material that had to be cut out of When We Were Kings. Indeed, Soul Poweris the direct product of selectively edited and re-assembled outtakes.

I had the time to do it and wanted to do it,” said Levy-Hinte, who has produced or exec-produced 18 movies in the last dozen years, including Laurel Canyon, Thirteen,Mysterious Skin and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. “I wanted to do one more documentary and a soundtrack album. A licensing deal fell apart, so that will have to wait.

“Leon and David own the masters for the concert footage, but not the sync and songwriter rights. In 1973, there weren’t any omnibus-rights agreements for television and video.”

Fortunately, the 30-year film concert footage fairly sparkled with clarity and color. The stage originally had been lit to accommodate a theatrical film, and the cinematographers, all of whom had experience shooting outdoor festivals, knew how to make the best of the existing technology.

“It was shot on 16mm film, which held the vivid colors and rich grain,” Levy-Hinte added. “If lit well, film can be very forgiving. In sense, this movie is a testament to the power of film.”

If Ali was the overriding presence in Kings, James Brown comes close to dominatingSoul Power. The Godfather of Soul had already toured the continent, and the cross-pollination was obvious. One doesn’t require a PhD in musicology to hear the rhythms of Africa in the music performed by his band or find the soul in the African performers chosen to perform on the same stage.

“This was one of Brown’s best bands and he was in his prime as a singer and dancer,” recalled the director. “I would have loved to have included more footage of the American musicians interacting with the locals and the African artists performing. It just wasn’t there, however.

“The American artists had their own reasons for coming to Zaire. For most, it simply was a gig in an interesting place, while others wanted to be part of the scene at the fight.

The Black Nationalist and back-to-Africa movement were at their height in the mid-1970s, he reminds. SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael had already moved to Guinea-Conakry with his then-wife, singer Miriam Makeba, and it was much on the minds of African-American activists. Years later, tyrants such as Mobuto would be unmasked as thieves and murderers.

Besides Brown, the roster of artists included the Spinners, Sister Sledge, Bill Withers, B.B. King,Celia Cruz, the Crusaders, the Fania All-Stars, Trio Madjesi and the Orchestre Afrisa International. Soul Power also incorporates footage taken backstage, during the construction of the stage and in the streets of Kinshasa. Ali, King and members of their entourage also show up in several scenes.

Levy-Hinte had enough outtake material left over to compile a substantial bonus package for the DVD package, set for release by Sony Music in October. It includes concert and logistical material, as well as scenes with Ali.

He currently is working on The Kids Are All Right, the third film he’s produced for Lisa Cholodenko. It stars Annette Bening, Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson, and describes what happens when two children conceived by artificial insemination bring their birth father into their family life.

– Gary Dretzka
July 10, 2009

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

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“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

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