"In September, Franklin successfully stopped the world premiere of the the Aretha Franklin documentary Amazing Grace — just hours before its release — after a federal court granted the singer an injunction. The film captures a star-studded gospel service headlined by Franklin in 1972. Franklin sued over image-usage rights.

"What we have here is a case of individuals who are hell-bent on exploiting the name and likeness of a world-renowned musical icon, at all costs," Franklin's lawyer, Arnold Reed, told the Free Press in August."

__________________________________________________________________________________

I never knew the 1972 LIVE recording was actually captured on film. So what's the deal? I'm guessing she does not own the rights to the documentary and The Powers That Be simply want to profit off her name and give her nothing...Aretha is worth around $60 Million...I would advise her to find investors and buy the documentary from Mr. X...

Chancellor said:

I heard about this awhile back and did wonder what happened - a shame there hasn't been some kind of agreement. I saw a brief piece of footage - Mick Jagger was in the audience.

mynameisnotsusan said:

I heard about this awhile back and did wonder what happened - a shame there hasn't been some kind of agreement. I saw a brief piece of footage - Mick Jagger was in the audience.

Mick Jagger? I wonder if that was Big-Lips first time going to a Black church?

Chancellor said:

:-P

Here's the clip here

Miss Franklin wants a couple of million for this to be released and the gentleman that mortgaged his home to buy this from Warners doesn't have 2 million to give her.

There have been attempts to work this out, but the advance is hefty.

There have been several distributors that have bid on this movie as it has been shown privately in Toronto in September. Also there was a link that was sent out ot several entertainment industry VIPa and they ahve said it is outstanding.

The Roots' drummer ?Questlove posted a clip not long ago.

For many wealthy celebs it is about the money, as it is widely known Miss Franklin is by no means broke, she has a net worth in 60 million range, one can only imagine her real worth.

Regarding the condo association lawsuit, she doesn't feel she owes them that, she ahs statedm "They overcharged, and I don't live there anyway". Her attorneys are handing both matters.

As posted way back in Sept, the project has sound and sync issues. There was a agreement not to distribute.

getxxxx said:

As posted way back in Sept, the project has sound and sync issues. There was a agreement not to distribute.

Had those issues, they were resolved. This is about $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$, period!

RnBAmbassador said:

Actually she was successful in halting this, she has the right too not someone make a profit off her likeness. Money or not.

Who has control over what?

This was supposed have been produced by the late (Warner Brothers) director Sydney Pollack. There's was a rumor back in the day, "Amazing Grace" was supposed to be released as a double feature... with"SuperFly" of all movies.

Again, in the mid 80's Amazing Grace was supposed to have aired on PBS. PBS. Chicago WTTW (PBS) did promos of the documentary. In one shot, you see Mick Jagger coming in and taking a seat at the back of the church. Yeah, this is all about money, it has to be. Open source software Audacity can resolve s sound and sync issues.

getxxxx said:

RnBAmbassador said:

Had those issues, they were resolved. This is about $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$, period!

Actually she was successful in halting this, she has the right too not someone make a profit off her likeness. Money or not.

She signed a contract with Warner Brothers and Atlantic back at the time of filmng that authorized release. As stated before this about $$$$$$$. She is wealthy enough to broker a fair deal with the owner of the film, but she according to sources wants 2 millon dollars.

In reality the film is already out there as many got the link in the same manner record labels give a download link for new releases. All it will take is for somebody to make copies bootleg style like they do with all other movie releases.

Miss Franklin may have found favorable judges to get the temporary injunction, but her power of influence does not reach into foreign countries where someone may produce this bootleg style.

I hope she and the owner can reach a fair and equitable compromise so the world can see it once and for all the right way.

http://www.hollywoodrepor...red-820294


The Hollywood Reporter

Sydney Pollack's 'Amazing Grace': The Tortured 4-Decade History of the Film Aretha Franklin Wants to Stop

Sydney Pollack's 'Amazing Grace'

by Chris Willman
9/4/2015 1:02pm PDT
In 1972, the director spent two days in a Watts church filming Franklin recording her historic gospel album. But he forgot to sync the sound. Now, after 43 years, the film is finally ready to be seen — if Franklin's lawsuit doesnt stop it.

If your record collection happens to contain an original vinyl copy of Aretha Franklin's landmark 1972 live album Amazing Grace — at double-platinum status, still her biggest seller, as well as the top-selling traditional gospel LP in history — take a look at the liner notes. There's a sentence in the credits promising an accompanying "Sidney [sic] Pollack" movie would soon be on the way.

Just 43 years behind schedule, the movie is ready to screen but Franklin, 73, sued Friday to try to stop it — and she seems to have succeeded so far.

Amazing Grace, an 87-minute documentary pulled together from footage the late Sydney Pollack shot of Franklin while she recorded her historic album in front of a congregation at a church in Watts, was scheduled to screen at both Friday's Telluride and next week's Toronto film festivals. The Telluride festival director said Friday that the screening will go on, but this afternoon, a U.S. district judge in Denver granted Franklin's emergency injunction motion to stop the film and the Telluride screening has now been canceled (instead, Jennifer Peedom's Sherpa, a documentary about climbing Mt. Everest, will be shown). It's the second time the singer has succeeded in keeping the film under wraps; she'd sued before in 2011, but circumstances have changed since then and it's unclear now if her legal argument will hold up when it eventually goes to court.

Squabbles like this one are only part of the reason the film has sat in a Warner Bros. vault for the better part of a half-century. The bigger reason was that, back in 1972, Pollack screwed up. The then-38-year-old hotshot coming off his first Oscar nomination (for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?), neglected to bring along sound-syncing clapper boards to the church, and ended up accidentally shooting the world's first silent rock doc.

Nobody remembers who first came up with the idea of turning Franklin's Watts sessions into a movie, but the man in charge of making it happen was legendary rock producer Joe Boyd (Nick Drake, Pink Floyd), who in late 1970 had been hired by Warner Bros. Pictures to head its newly expanded music department. A recent merger had brought the film studio and Warner Bros. Records (which owned Atlantic Records, the label recording Franklin's gospel LP) under one corporate umbrella, and the company was looking for ways to sell movie tickets along with albums. "This was the dawn of synergy," Boyd, now 73, recalls in an interview.

It was also the golden age of rockumentaries. In 1970 alone, there'd been Woodstock, Gimme Shelter and Elvis: That's the Way It Is. Boyd had already started to assemble a team of established documentary cameramen for the Franklin film, but the then-head of Warner Bros. Pictures, Ted Ashley, had other ideas. "I got a call from Ted saying, 'Great news!' " recalls Boyd. "He'd had dinner the night before with Sydney Pollack, and Sydney was now going to film Aretha's movie. I said, 'Ted, has he ever shot live music before? It's kind of a specialized skill.' And he said, 'What are you talking about, Joe? It's Sydney Pollack!"

Pollack arrived at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Los Angeles on Jan. 13, 1972, with a crew of film and sound engineers and five 16mm cameras. He began shooting as Franklin, with a choir behind her, belted out gospel tunes ranging from "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" to Marvin Gaye's "Wholly Holy." You can occasionally spot the young director, wearing '70s-style corduroy and Brillo pad-like sideburns, hand-gesturing to his crew as he zips around the parishioners assembled for the recording. Look carefully and you'll see, rocking out in the back of the church, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts (who, perhaps not coincidentally, were about to record Exile on Main Street, the Rolling Stones' most overtly gospel-influenced album). "I'd seen Aretha many times in concert," Jagger tells The Hollywood Reporter, "but this was the first time I'd seen her in a church. It was an exciting and unique occasion."

Pollack spent two days shooting Franklin in Watts. But as he discovered afterward, without clapper boards snapping shut at the beginning of each take to help synchronize sound and picture, the 20 hours of footage he had accumulated was all but worthless. "It was frustrating as hell," recalls William Steinkamp, Pollack's longtime editor. "[The footage] was like a jigsaw puzzle. We had a team on it, and you'd work on it for a while and give up.'" The choir director from the Watts recordings was brought in to try to lip-read the reels, but after months of work, only about 150 minutes of footage had been matched with sound, none of it adding up to a complete, useable song. Deadlines passed as the Amazing Grace album came out in June 1972, selling millions with no synergy. In August, Warner Bros. officially wrote off and shelved the movie.

Pollack moved on to his next film, working with another diva, Barbra Streisand, on The Way We Were. And his Aretha film sat in cans gathering dust for decades, although he never gave up on the idea of someday reviving the movie. "Every seven or eight years or so," recalls Steinkamp, "I'd go, 'Hey, what happened to that Aretha Franklin stuff?' He'd go, 'Aw, goddam it, it's still there!' He'd sit in his office and look at these VHS tapes that didn't have any sound and kind of dream about it. It was something he always wanted to try to finish, but he'd get busy" — with films like Tootsie and The Firm — "and it'd get back-burnered again."

Enter producer Alan Elliott, who had been intrigued by the legend of the lost Aretha doc ever since he was an A&R staffer at Atlantic in the early 1990s. So intrigued that he broached the subject with his Atlantic boss, Jerry Wexler, who had co-produced the Amazing Grace album. Wexler and other mutual friends — songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman — helped arrange a meeting between Elliott and Pollack in 2007. For a year the two men exchanged calls about how to bring the Franklin feature back to life. Then Pollack's health took a turn for the worse. "I knew Sydney had terminal cancer," recalls Elliott. "So I called him and started to say, 'Look, I'm really sorry about you being sick.' He said, 'I'm not sick — I'm f—ing dying.' He had a way of getting right to the truth of the matter. He said, 'You know this [material] better than I do. So I'm going to go to Warner Bros. and make sure you get to finish this movie.'"

Elliot took his dying friend's words seriously; he was determined to finish Pollack's film. He even mortgaged his own home to purchase the negative from Warner Bros. (WME's Ari Emanuel, Elliott's one-time partner in an early, failed Internet venture, put in a good word for him with the studio). And finally, two years after Pollack's death in 2008, working with the digital detectives at the Deluxe film lab, who used computers to sift through the footage and audio recordings, Elliott succeeded in syncing the movie. There was an early screening in 2010, and a trailer was even cut, as Elliott planned for a 2011 release of Amazing Grace. Then, yet another snag: Franklin filed a lawsuit against Elliott for appropriating her likeness without permission.

Franklin won't say what upsets her about the movie's release — she declined to comment for this story, although she recently told The Detroit Free Press that she'd seen and "loves" the movie. But back then she had Elliot over a barrel. He'd been able to find the original 1972 release contracts for everyone except, puzzlingly, its star. He'd been forced to settle the suit, agreeing not to show the movie without Franklin's permission. But then last year Franklin's contract suddenly turned up at Warner Bros. The reason Elliott hadn't been able to locate it was because her paperwork had been signed in 1969, not 1972 — and what she signed was a personal service contract for both the movie studio and record label that effectively gave them full rights to the material filmed in the Watts church (and now, Elliott believes, he's got the rights, as the film's new owner).

Two weeks ago, Franklin's then-lawyer, Arnold Reed, was making noises about filing a new suit to prevent the film from screening at Telluride and Toronto. "Once we make a decision [to litigate], Alan Elliott won't be able to show that film in his garage," the attorney told THR, arguing that releasing the film without her approval and compensation constitutes "an act of thievery." As of yesterday, though, Franklin appears to have a new firm representing her, Dykema Gossett in Detroit. And now Franklin has sought an emergency injunction in Colorado to stop the Telluride and Toronto screenings.

"I understand she's used to getting paid a lot of money to do promotion for a project like this," says Elliott, who continues to have faith that eventually Franklin will see the light. "But I hope at some point she will come around. I always want to do right by Aretha."

mynameisnotsusan said:

without clapper boards snapping shut at the beginning of each take to help synchronize sound and picture, the 20 hours of footage he had accumulated was all but worthless. "It was frustrating as hell," recalls William Steinkamp, Pollack's longtime editor. "[The footage] was like a jigsaw puzzle. We had a team on it, and you'd work on it for a while and give up.'"

I didn't realize that clapper boards helped sync the sound. Makes sense.

mynameisnotsusan said:

"I understand she's used to getting paid a lot of money to do promotion for a project like this," says Elliott, who continues to have faith that eventually Franklin will see the light. "But I hope at some point she will come around. I always want to do right by Aretha."

Thanks for posting the article...What a story...Decades of that silent-footage just sitting around and it had to wait until Technology came around and worked its Magic...I still say the BEST way for The Queen to Bank off the Docu-film is to buy the thing...Aretha & her lawyer(s) are looking at the here and now, not the future profits..Do you know how many people would go to theaters just to see a decades old footage of Aretha singing? Millions of church & non/church folks would embrace it...Let's not even talk about her cut from Pay-per-view & DVD sales....

LittleBLUECorvette said:

I think I have this from years ago. Was it on Showtime in like 1988?

..LOL...Don't tell ReRe or she will come after everything you got, including all the Groceries you just put in your fridge...

regarding the synching problems....

Reminds me of Prince's SOTT concert movie.All of this amazing footage was shot,but it was grainy and most of it could not be used for the actual film.Prince had to take his band to Paisley Park and "re-create" the performances (lipsyncing to the live recordings).

SoulAlive said:

regarding the synching problems....

Reminds me of Prince's SOTT concert movie.All of this amazing footage was shot,but it was grainy and most of it could not be used for the actual film.Prince had to take his band to Paisley Park and "re-create" the performances (lipsyncing to the live recordings).

I always thought that movie looked a little weird.

Chancellor said:

mynameisnotsusan said:

I heard about this awhile back and did wonder what happened - a shame there hasn't been some kind of agreement. I saw a brief piece of footage - Mick Jagger was in the audience.

Mick Jagger? I wonder if that was Big-Lips first time going to a Black church?

Excuse me? I think you'll find it's Big-ass-lips.

[Edited 11/10/15 19:03pm]

Cinny said:

SoulAlive said:

regarding the synching problems....

Reminds me of Prince's SOTT concert movie.All of this amazing footage was shot,but it was grainy and most of it could not be used for the actual film.Prince had to take his band to Paisley Park and "re-create" the performances (lipsyncing to the live recordings).

I always thought that movie looked a little weird.

I think it looks great.They did a good job recreating the performances In fact,if I hadn't heard about the re-filmed scenes shot at Paisley Park,I would have never known.It looks like an authentic concert film to me.

bluegangsta said:

Chancellor said:

Mick Jagger? I wonder if that was Big-Lips first time going to a Black church?

Excuse me? I think you'll find it's Big-ass-lips.

[Edited 11/10/15 19:03pm]