| By Fred Topel
In Theaters March 31
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What’s the point of doing a movie if you can’t even say the title? The Beastie Boys, with their trademark sense of humor, put the dirtiest word of all in the name of their concert film. While some brave movie theaters may display it on the marquee, we can’t even write it in our article.
In Awesome…, the Beastie Boys gave video cameras to 50 fans at their concert and edited the footage together for the ultimate fan experience. “The title was really just something that the person who was doing the briefing to the camera operators said off the cuff,” said director Adam Yauch. “He just said like someday you’re going to look back on this in 20 years and say, ‘Awesome, I f*ckin’ shot that.’ Then the way it actually sort of wound up becoming the title is we had subtitles on that at one point. It was up on the screen and it was kind of freeze framed on the screen, and I think Adam Horowitz walked through the room and he looked at the screen and he said, ‘Heh, that’d be a funny thing to call the movie.’ And it kind of stuck.”
Footage from the 50 fans is sometimes blurry and usually jittery, but that was part of the experience. There were a few additional professional cameras shooting the Boys backstage. “A couple of the cameras were also in the hands of people that were working with us on the film. You could actually see the difference in the quality because there are six DV cameras, like 24p cameras and those are a couple of them that go onto the backstage area. Most of the ones who are out in the audience were HI-8s. Actually there are two fixed cameras right on either side of the DJ booth that are like surveillance cameras. They’re actually motor controlled surveillance cameras basically.”
This exercise was the one time where it might have been better to sit in the nosebleed seats. “We actually just asked people to sign up on the message boards. The concert was already sold out so we asked if people who had tickets would be interested in filming. Some people signed up and we looked at their seat numbers and we looked at a seating chart and just found people that were evenly spread out over the arena. That was about it. We weren’t asking for any experience, just some enthusiasm and a good seating position.”
Shooting the concert took one night but putting the footage together was a year and a half process. “The problem is after we got all the tapes back, we loaded them all in, we had a system set up with a server actually, two servers in conjunction with each other and four edit bays that are hooked into the central server that holds all the media. So we loaded everything in, digitized the tapes and then we did a rough mix of the audio, like a really rough mix of it, laid that down, laid all the footage back against it. Then we had to do some corrections on the footage to get it all to sync in Final Cut. And there’s actually 61 angles when we had them all stacked because of the other cameras that I mentioned before, some of the lock offs on stage and the surveillance cameras and things. So then from those 61 angles, three editors went at it and they had 20 cameras each that they were cutting from. So they each did a cut. And they did that pretty quick. In the first couple of weeks or months or whatever it was, they each did a rough cut. So then we had these three different cuts and then took some of the best parts of that and stacked them in. I started working with the main editor and we started really focusing on refining but that sort of became like a bed or a canvas to cut on top of. I think a lot of times with editing, it’s easier to cut on top of something than it is to cut on just like a blank space. A lot of times for editing, I like to just lay something down and then cut on top of that because you can see if some things work or don’t.”
Yauch took the name Nathaniel Hornblower as his directing credit on the film, an alias he’s used in music videos and other Beastie Boys projects. The name goes back to their second album. “It was like a quick decision. Actually I was working on the cover for the Paul’s Boutique record, the jacket and I had done the layout and the photo for the cover. I just wanted to put some kind of credit on there but I didn’t want to put my own name and I just kind of stuck that on there. Then I kept using it for visual related things, like when I worked on videos or photos or what not. I was using that.”
They chose the New York show at Madison Square Garden for the film because they relish the reactions from fans in their home town. “It’s always cool going back and playing in New York. If you’re on tour and traveling around and you go back and play at home, it’s always a good feeling. I think that’s why we chose that concert to document. It always feels kind of cool going back and playing your home town.”
More than 20 years after they burst onto the scene, even the Beastie Boys are surprised that the ride has lasted so long. “I think early on, when the band was starting, I don't know that any of us expected it to last more than a couple weeks, that we were really throwing together a band to just play some songs or a couple clubs for some friends.”
That said, their fan base runs the gamut and there are no stereotypical Beastie Boys fans. “It’s pretty varied. I think there are different types of people that are into it. Some people are younger or older. From what I see anyway and there are different albums. Different albums have kind of like different sensibilities to them so I think there’s a pretty varied bunch.”
Awesome… opens Friday, March 31. |
