Early in the planning of Woodstock, 50 years ago this year, co-founder Joel Rosenmann had a hunch that he and his team were on to what would soon become a cultural touchstone. “I think it came in stages for me,” Rosenmann tells the Guardian, looking back at the three-day event in which wound up defining a generation. “We weren’t thinking if it would become legendary or not, but from the beginning we knew we had something extraordinary. When the crowd started coming in, our estimates had been blow away.”
Exactly how a group of ragtag founders, iconic musicians and hordes of young spectators turned 1969’s Woodstock Music and Arts festival into an integral part of American lore is outlined in the new documentary Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation. The film takes a fresh look at an otherwise ubiquitous event, aiming to set itself apart from the 1970 Oscar-winning concert film that featured the festival’s performances (and was edited in part by a young Martin Scorsese). Director Barak Goodman instead shifts the perspective from the legends on the stage to the people on the ground. “We wanted to explore what it was about this festival that made it stand out when it comes of every music event in the past 50 years,” says Goodman of his team’s approach. “It certainly wasn’t only because of the music, even though it was great. It was something else, and we wanted to explore what that something else was.”
The answer Goodman found lay in the firsthand experiences of the festival’s peripheral figures, with about 50 original interviews conducted which reveal never-before-heard insight into the creation of the festival and the drama and intrigue that surrounds it. Complementing the narrative is a treasure trove of footage that’s been locked away for a half-century. “The festival was shot by a group of hippie film-makers who put in their own money and captured everything from end to end,” says Goodman, noting that there were three dedicated crews who did nothing but film the crowd. “At the time, everyone was only focused on the performances so they never never entertained the thought of turning the footage from the crowd into a film.”
However, securing the film didn’t come easy. “The longest part of making this documentary was working out a deal to get all of the footage,” notes editor Jamila Ephron of the task. “We had heard all kinds of stories about how maybe it was missing, or that there’d been a flood and it was floating in a basement somewhere at the Warner Brothers archives. But it wasn’t. It was safe and it was beautiful.” Weeding through dozens of hours’ worth of raw dailies, Ephron was taken by the attitude of the crowd. “You see the faces on these kids, they’re so at ease being there and with the camera that there’s something so disarming and awe-inspiring about their innocence.” The end result takes viewers inside an event that, while romanticized in the intervening years, was filled with snags. “You’re shown food stands with no food, toilets filled with thick mud, and the rainstorm,” says Goodman. “Everything was covered.”
For Rosenmann, his association with Woodstock has proven to be a double-edged sword considering he’ll forever be remembered for a mere three days that occurred a half-century ago. “I won’t deny that whenever I go to dinner people always seem to want to know about it,” says Rosenmann who was recruited by the festival co-founder Michael Lang and thought of the initial idea to stage an outdoor concert. “I’ll certainly never be able to erase the memories of what arose, but feel proud I was able to navigate it all.” He’s referring to the fact that with nearly everything going haywire and a festival on the brink of disaster, the last thing he was able to do during the event was actually enjoy what he accomplished. “It’s not like I could have kicked back, chilled and listened to the music.”
Considering all that went wrong in 1969, including the much-repeated tale of how the festival was supposed to take place in the town of Woodstock, New York, before losing their original land and having to take over a dairy farm 43 miles west in Bethel, one can’t help draw a parallel to the much-ballyhooed troubles to this August’s Woodstock 50. The anniversary concert headed by original co-founder Michael Lang has been plagued with a court battle, financial difficulties, a lack of permits and a Shakespearean amount of infighting enough to fill a documentary of its own.
Despite it all, Rosenmann (whose Woodstock Ventures licensed the branding to Lang’s production company) remains optimistic about its prospects. “Even though we’re not producing it, we’re rooting for it,” he explains. “As far as what the media is doing to either approve of it, worry about it, cast doubt about it, that changes day to day. It wouldn’t be a good story without the drama and uncertainty but we couldn’t be more excited and enthusiastic about it and hopeful that it will be a huge success.”
After all, Rosenmann knows from personal experience that a rocky lead-up can turn into legend. “The pressure can energize you rather than undercut you,” he explains. “No matter how an event like this is produced, it’s just a catalyst that brings out whatever is innate in the audience. After the festival in 1969, when the headlines changed from Nightmare in the Catskills to Miracle at Bethel, we started understanding that maybe we were taking a history-making turn.” That David and Goliath story of overcoming the odds is an aspect that Rosemann is grateful the documentary captures. “The reason why I love Barak and Jamila’s film so much is that it showcases what I feel is the most important part of Woodstock. The wonderful part of that weekend was the indelible understanding that our species has a real good shot at being around for another thousand years because we had those instincts.”
Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation is now out in the US with a UK date yet to be announced
