Some Documentaries About Creative People

The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling

As I said in a recent episode of the podcast, I have spent many evenings in the pandemic watching old shows. HBO Max has "The Larry Sanders Show", which remains compelling. I noticed they also had Judd Apatow's 2018 documentary about Garry Shandling, "The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling". I started the first of its 2 parts expecting a typical hagiography by a series of talking heads.

I got something more inspiring and interesting. 

The movie highlights a fundamental conflict within Shandling. He is knowledgeable about Zen Buddhism. He meditates. He journals.  He is clearly looking to alleviate the suffering that comes from attachment. But Shandling is also striving for success and personal happiness, and his hunger for those achievements is palpable. 

The documentary gave me new appreciation for Shandling as a person, and for his work. As funny and entertaining as both Shandling and this movie can be, I also found something melancholy and poetic in both.

George Carlin's American Dream

Judd Apatow also made a documentary about George Carlin -- "George Carlin's American Dream" was released earlier this year. Carlin's work remains extremely relevant. 

The documentary traces Carlin's evolution as a person and thinker, and shows how his ambitions and feelings drove his extremely clever material. The film, like the critics, can be overly dismissive of some of his early work. It seems unfair to expect Carlin to make us laugh and think for his entire career. Most comedians would have settled for an entire career built around Carlin's lesser bits, and we would have considered theme to be great. Check it out, but be sure to watch a few George Carlin specials, too.

Get Back

This documentary about The Beatles making what would become "Let It Be" is an impressive achievement in some ways. Peter Jackson and his team had mountains of footage to wade through, all needing clean-up, and still missing coverage of essential bits and moments. All those shortcomings were resolved, through technology and hard work. The film looks vintage, but good. The sound is great. A modest framework has been added to help give some shape -- there's a calendar, and each of the three sections of this 6-hour film focuses on a particular slice of the project.

But it's way too long. Perhaps it is truly capturing how these interminable and aimless sessions must have felt to the participants. Perhaps it is just difficult for me to appreciate, because much of the footage isn't "revelatory", it's somewhere between "Well, this is what writing songs and rehearsing with a band is like. What's the big deal?" and a kind of PTSD flashback of the worst band practices and arguments you've ever had.

Overall, the film does help remind us The Beatles were just a band. A really good band, made of talented players and writers, hardened by a few years of intense gigs, who made some foundational records and had incredible influence...but also just a band. 

And this is what bands do, what practices feel like. Long. Boring. Full of goof-off covers, space jams, multiple tries at songs, and occasionally, transcendence when you hit on something good or play a song particularly well. Crankiness, fights, people trying to push things into shape, and people quitting.

There is something nice about sticking with the original footage and resisting the urge to supplement it with modern interviews, voiceovers, or anything additional. But this also makes "Get Back" somewhat  monochromatic, and combined with the sort of shapeless nature of the film, it made watching it feel a bit like a chore. The titles next to every single musical moment seem a bit overblown, too.

Nothing really happens. We don't get much context around why The Beatles want to do this (or even if they want to). If you know The Beatles and their story, there's foreshadowing inherent in the project. But if you don't...you aren't told this would be their last album. There's also so much left out, including how these sessions turned into the very different album that was ultimately released, what the band thought, how it was received, and so on. 

And then the movie just sort of ends. Recommended only if you're a hardcore Beatles fan.

Here To Be Heard: The Story of The Slits

Like the Moog documentary, it is unfortunate this project is not better, because it is now likely the only non-fiction film we will get about The Slits. I can look past the extremely low budget -- it has no real lighting, most of the dialog is picked up with ambient mics, and the movie seems to have been shot on consumer-grade gear. OK, fine, but this is such a compelling story about critical people from the original UK punk scene, so the story will be great, right?

Director William Badgley does not manage to tell it well. The best bits of the documentary come from the "where are they now" aspect of the film, though the answers are mostly sadly predictable (dead, in recovery from drugs, etc.) with a few shining exceptions. 

Badgley spends a lot of time with some of the members of the band, and what feels like hardly any with others. Viv Albertine, in particular, seems to get almost no camera time. This is odd, because she is the most articulate of the former members, and because she wrote an excellent memoir which does a far better job of telling not just her story, but the band's story as well.

I suspect Badgley was intent on staying in the good graces of the band, and/or that the band had final cut. This is because several critical bits of information are simply left out of the band's story. One of those critical bits of information is that Ari Up's mother -- publishing heiress Nora Forster -- married Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) in 1979. (Forster is 13 years older than Lydon, and Lydon is 6 years older than Ari.) 

Lydon and Forster adopted two of Ari Up's children 10 years before her death. You can do some internet research as to why, but it does not cast Ari Up in a good light. 

Lydon does not appear in the documentary, nor is he really mentioned. He probably didn't want to be in the documentary, and he can be litigious. Still, facts are facts.

Another fact is that Ari Up refused treatment for her cancer, which could have saved her life (and would certainly have prolonged it). Again, a known fact that goes unmentioned.

These omissions make me wonder what else was left out of the story. Read Viv Albertine's book instead.