Three New Clips

For those new to this blog, welcome. What we are doing here is putting up sample clips from a just finished movie that isn't released yet. What's the movie called? Alley Pat: The Music Is Recorded. And do you got some sort of detailed explanation? Yes, here.

Alley Pat was an R&B DJ in Atlanta in the 50s and 60s (and 70s and 80s and 90s too) who had a hilariously outrageous on-air style, and he did it effortlessly. Me, I'm an ex DJ, and now a filmmaker. I made a lot of audio tapes of Pat decades ago, and these airchecks sat in a shoebox all these years, and as a editor at a big post house I started thinking that these tapes could be tuned into a movie without much effort. That was 9 years ago. There was a lot of effort involved after all, especially when one person is producing, directing, and editing.

Lets jump right in and look at a clip of a somewhat typical Alley Pat commercial.



So there you go, a pretty insane way to do radio advertising. And you start to see why it took so long. To make a film I had to fill up a blank screen every time Pat, bless him, opened his mouth. In addition to crazy commercials, Alley Pat chose fantastic R&B and jazz to play, like the Count Basie in this clip....



There really aren't that many jazz shows on the radio anymore - although H Johnson's show on WABE certainly stands out - but it is really rare for a jazz DJ to entertain and inform and generally carry on right on top of the fantastic jazz he's selected. And this is where Pat really would swing.

And when he'd play him some Ray Charles he couldn't help but start singing along, like so....



The B&W photo in this picture is actually of another Atlanta DJ from that period, Roosevelt Johnson. The picture came from the Georgia State University Photo Archives. I pretty much used everything they had that was Atlanta radio related, and then I deftly cropped, panned and scanned to hide the fact there just weren't more that one or two pictures of Pat in a radio booth during the era I am trying to portray. Plus Pat is playing "I Got A Woman" here while the picture shows a DJ with 78 RPM records -- even though that song never came out on a 78. But Ray Charles did go back far enough to have put out some great 78s before that song. So when you are working for nothing, and just for fun, you can be precise and imprecise, and I welcome anyone to point out further discrepancies... at which point I will ask you for $20.

Also, lo and behold in that clip, it's the great H Johnson himself, who is now 70 and held Alley Pat, now 90, as his mentor. H delicately gets into that delicate topic of CPT.

Subscribe to this blog and to the youtube channel AlleyPatMovie because there are many more great clips to come. And say a prayer to The God Of Local Film Festivals to help get the film a slot at the Atlanta Film Fest here in April. Amen!

Second Official Selection - Closer than Great Britian This Time

How about this -- the Macon Film Festival now has the Alley Pat film as an official selection. Thank you Macon. Their website says each of their films plays in one of three historic movie palaces in Macon Georgia. Looking forward to this one very much.

So lets watch another clip, one I call "Conversations I Would Not Have Heard." We introduce our pal Mike Cooper here. He was a radio journalist who first began taping Pat's shows because he found them so interesting and fun, and mailing them to me while I still lived in Florida. Lets watch...




So once again you see the filmmakers dilemma... a great story about an incident on a deserted road, and no visuals whatsoever. What to do. First, I transcribed the story and put the type up on screen. I figured that when Pat was talking in the movie, let him talk, but if he was talking to someone, show the words. Then I reached for a book of old highway maps I have from the 1950's. If you look closely it's what you dont see - no interstate highways on these maps, just a tangle of "Dirty Back Roads" as the B-52's sang.

The line "We stopped when we got to East Point" has Pat and Odell cracking up, and it makes me laugh each time too. But it is one of many local references (East Point would have been on about the fringe of the Atlanta metro area in those days) that I didn't really take the time to explain to the potential non-Atlanta viewer. In the same fashion as Monty Pythons early shows, never intended for viewing outside of the UK, and yet full of mysterious charm for the non-local viewer.

I took a call from Andy Young last week... he really likes the film to my great relief, 'cos of course we got him playin' the clown in it here and there. He went to visit Pat last week (Pat is still slowly recovering from a mild stroke) and said he was out of bed, in the kitchen, cussin' everybody out. We agreed this was very good progress!

I'll put up some more clips soon... I sho' nuff got a mess of them.

Brilliant, Luv! Official Festival Selection for ALLEY PAT.

This is good. This is good. We are entered in about 10 festivals, at some expense, and the first one to turn us down was in Cardiff, Wales, and the first one to pick us up - I have just found out - is in Swansea, Wales. The Swansea Bay Festival, to be exact.

I knew this movie would connect in the Atlanta area with just about anyone who sees it, but perhaps less so outta town, as I didnt spend a lot of time in the film explaining all the local references. So internationally, a big crapshoot. But looks like someone over there likes it.



This film festival seems pretty together... they even sent along a proper You Are So Officially Selected JPEG grafic. Way to go, Swansea Bay. Damn! Now I am going to have to redo that poster.



Why Wales you ask. Well it is odd... you go over the list of possible festivals to enter and you say, hmmm, where might I stay for free... nope, dont know anyone in Seattle, or Mexico City... then oh look, a festival in Wales, I know someone in Wales where I could stay... like in a million years they would choose your film.

So now I am stuck, ha. Now I gotta go. It wont screen till next spring, so there's time to knock over a 7-11 to get some air fare to the UK. My friend there is Sue Kelasll, a print artist I have known geez for 30 years from when she was a pen pal in high school.

Plus, I see on the Swansea Fest's webpage this banner logo, which to me implies that I could stay over at Catherine Zeta-Jones's place if Sue is booked.


Or maybe stay in this dragon's cave, if he'd stop muttering something about "Crrmnnyu"

Damning The Seafood Restaurant With Faint Praise

Here's a new clip, with Pat at it again, suggesting you go to this little seafood place because the place ain't smelly.





This clip always makes me laugh, and not just for the commercial. The very wonderful H Johnson of WABE's Saturday jazz show sets up Pat's commercial just perfectly. He is sitting in the big Audio A studio at Crawford, and since this doc is a one-man-band thing I am interviewing him and running camera. I try to do a graceful slow and steady zoom in, just as H quotes Pat in a food commercial saying "well you are gonna die anyway so why not eat here." So I am cracking up, and you can hear me stifling a laugh in the background as the zoom shakes slightly.

This clip again shows the challenge of making a movie about radio. A lot of period-perfect visuals are needed. I really made use of the GSU on-line photo archive. There are thousands of images there, for a transfer fee of a few dollars. As I was keen on not spending any money at all, I stuck with their supposedly "low res" web samples... and guess what, all the pix look just fine to me. With this being standard def television, you dont need anything better than 72 DPI. Here's a photo of theirs of I think Decatur Street downtown in the early 60's or so, borrowed from the web. Looks crisp to me, I'm just unable to blow it up very much.



For HD of course I would have needed better resolution. But when I started this movie in 2000 or 2001, it would have been a complicated hassle to go HD. Now I wish I had, but hindsight is 20/20.

Happy Birthday Alley Pat!

90 today!

If you want to send him a message, you can send it to me at troche2255@yahoo.com and I will get it to him. His mailing address is in the next blog posting, below.

Tom

Pat and the big 90

Wednesday, December 2nd, Alley Pat will turn 90. That's n-i-n-e-t-y years old.

That's 1919 to 2009... what a ride.

I'm happy to report that Pat is recovering nicely from his mild stroke. I went to visit him this past Friday. He's out of the care center at home at his daughter-in-law's. His voice is stronger but he has to walk carefully till his balance gets better.

One of his old Morehouse pals, a retired dentist from Birmingham named George, stopped by the same day. He has known Pat since 1943, and Pat's memories of those long ago days are quite sharp. And his short term memory is improving each day, and this is normal in this sort of healing process. It was fun to watch these two spry codgers cutting each other up.

Debra, Pat's daughter-in-law, says they don't have anything planned to commemorate this great day just yet, but that they would like to have some sort of public event early next year perhaps. I told her that I - and all of his fans - would be at her side to help in any way possible.

What you can do is send Pat birthday wishes the old fashioned way, to this old-school analog address:

James "Alley Pat" Patrick
1740 Joseph E Boone Blvd

Atlanta GA 30314

Or just leave a comment to this blog post with your name and I will be sure to get the message to Pat for you.

Poster Competion Winner Announced

So I promised a poster competition bake off - my poster with my pedestrian photoshop skills, vs. Darryl Vance's poster that came in the mail last week.




To make Darry'ls work look even better, lets briefly revisit the one I made, right-cheer on the left. Looks cluttered but still has that indie feel. The kids love the indie feel.











By comparison... how about this??




OK, the phone lines are closed, we have a winner. Thanks Darryl. Fantastic type choices, design choices, wonderful layout... it is as if you do this for a living. Now with this film on a strict zero dollar budget, (minus $500 in film festival entry fees the last few months, ouch) where am I gonna find a way to print color posters for free??

Your suggestions (and money) dear readers are welcome!

Honorable Andrew Young and... Pink Hair Curlers??

Clip number two features the Honorable Andrew Young, former Atlanta Mayor and former US Ambassador. I had been working on this film for years and wondering when would I really ever have enough material to make the story work. When I finally got Pat and Andy on tape I said OK, done.





Ambassador Young in person is wise and warm, with a slight mischievous streak that never comes across in TV interviews. For the interviews taped in 2008 at Crawford Post Production - where I've worked for 24 years now - he was often quite funny, and I'm happy he let his hair down while the cameras rolled.

The second part of the clip has audio from some of the earliest Alley Pat cassette tapes, and was recorded by Mike Cooper a decade or more earlier than many of my later tapes. So Pat's voice is slightly younger and higher pitched here. The WERD graphic in the background is from an old Broadcasting Magazine Yearbook from the collection of longtime DJ and broadcast historian (and friend since high school) Brock Whaley.

Here's another clip:




Now we are getting into the psychology of Pat's benign insult humor... how people expect it from him and he happily obliges. The business in this flower shop ad - where he observes that funerals and weddings are synonymous - is a good example of how his old shows were just relentlessly whacked-out.

For ALLEY PAT: THE MUSIC IS RECORDED I needed to put some strong and funny stuff up front, because a lot of these film festival panels have ten dozen long films to wade through, and you gotta hook them fast. Or so I imagine.

Luckily I have about 20 hours of old Alley Pat recordings, so it was no problem to find the 40 minutes worth of "strong and funny" to fill the film. I could really do another documentary, a Part II, with what's on the cutting room floor. And no, I am not.

Creeping up in the background is a breezy bass & xylophone track by the Modern Jazz Quartet... a track I like so much it ended up in the film repeatedly.

Check back often, more clips coming.

A Good Place To Start: Preview Clip 1

So hey, let’s watch a movie!




I have a dedicated YouTube channel set up to stream some teaser clips, so to speak, of ALLEY PAT: THE MUSIC IS RECORDED. And I have a mess of them already digitized – usually about a minute each – and I’m gonna put up a new one every week or so.

This one is right at the start of the film, right after the open. H Johnson, sitting in Audio A at Crawford, very nicely lit. (Herman, right, but he goes just by H.) One of the most down to earth people you will ever meet. H was actually about 70 when we recorded that – can you believe that? He just looks great.

I like that he gets a Steve Allen reference in there. Then its right into an Alley Pat aircheck, the first of dozens. So the viewer is still going what is going on here, this DJ guy Pat sings over a Jimmy Reed song, and poorly at that, then with baby talk, and then the song ends and the next LP cut starts because he didn’t switch off the turntable. Is this movie going to be just this junk???

Back to H, now we’re intercutting. You see, as director I can’t run various Alley Pat bits back-to-back, as they cover many years and it’d be confusing. So I do talking head then aircheck, talking head/aircheck… takes a little more movie time, but at least the story can move on steadily.

Zoom..… were are straight into Pat’s hilarious ticket “rant” where he would often joke-lecture his audience - for their own good. “If you get your tickets early like them white folk….” This was a piece of tape that went into the movie last minute, straight to the front of the film,on the last rough cut. It’s on a great unlogged cassette that turned up in a box of cables at home.

Has that bizarre time check to, for "Gruen Precision Watches," a long out of business watch company.

You’ll be “In the back! In the corner! In the dark! If you don’t get your tickets like them white folk do.” Just classic stuff. Wonderful improvisation. Never ever a script. How did he do it?

DIY Movie Poster

So if you do a movie (pretty much) all by yourself, you then have to do a movie poster (pretty much) all by yourself. I don't know nearly enough about Photoshop, but I know enough to be dangerous, so I last month I set out to make something basic. I sent my first effort off to this blog you are reading, and to Darryl Vance, the talented graphics artist in San Francisco who generously spent weeks making the movie's open free of charge.


He then said oh, no doncha worry, he would do the poster. Still though, I have continued to mess with what I began with, and the nature of Photoshop is you just keep piling stuff on untill maybe it gets just too cluttered and you dial back.

The first draft, above, has a lot of stuff Darryl designed just for the 90 second piece that serves both as the slam bam open and complete story of Pat's career. (By telling this whole story briefly up front, it made it less jarring to jump around Pat's timeline later - not to mention jump from radio station to radio station - without confusing the viewer.)


So he had sent me not only the completed open but all the various elements, including the radio tuning dial stick that runs right down the middle, and the 55 -70- 80 AM radio dial representation.


So to make this first draft of the poster, I used this picture of Pat from 1959 w/ him and Jackie Wilson and I believe JB Blayton that is in the film. I had found this crisp 8x10 deep in the archives of the Auburn Avenue Research library.

I did a very high res scan of it, then flipped it so Pat would be on the right side of the poster - better compositionally.


I then did an admittedly very poor matte outline to remove the background, then softened the edges to hide how lazy I am. Then I put a blue wash over the image, as this is sort of tint I did to many of the archive elements throughout the film

For the second draft of the poster I added the names of all the on-camera participants, as if they were movie stars I guess. But only Andrew Young is a widely recognizable name - although H Johnson has been a jazz DJ in Atlanta for many years and folk in the know know of him. Skip Mason is a big wheel at Morehouse College so many people in Atlanta know him too. Then Marsha the writer, Eddie the musician, and Mike the journalist who made some of the earliest radio tapes used in the film.

I then shrunk all the type a little bit, 'cos my ego got the best of me and I figured I might as well give myself a "produced & directed by" credit too. Of course I stretched all the letters super-tall in Hollywood poster tradition, but not so tall they would be completely unreadable - the way Hollywood really does it, as if they are embarrassed to have worked on their own movie.

For the third draft I shrunk all the type some more to show some screen grabs from the movie. One of the festivals I entered was alone in demanding some screen grabs be sent with the entry, and I figured I'd better grab 25 frames just to have them ready for a futer press kit. AS IF this film will actually be released someday, ha... I got Hosea Williams in there, H Johnson, Andy...Then I got a high resolution microphone shot and defocused and dimmed it and put it in the background. Now are we too cluttered? I think it is looking OK.


It will be interesting to see if Darryl goes in a completely different direction. I'll bet he will. Then the nearly zero readers of this blog can vote on their favorites. Ohhh boy!

St Augustine Trip

The post I had here earlier has been taken down temporarily due to some formatting problems with the pictures I had included. Will try to repost my story soon.

Tom

Andy Young Returns to St Augustine

I think one of the reasons I was lucky enough to get former US UN ambassador and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young to sit for an interview about (and with) Alley Pat was due to my involvement in the film "Dare Not Walk Alone." You can find it on Netflix or buy it, it is a highly recommended look at the awful civil rights battles in St Augustine Florida. As historians constantly revisit Selma or Birmingham, St Aug's story - equally compelling if not more so - just seemed to fade away.

Few historical films are all that innovative, but this is an exception.... a very compelling saga yet it is thought provoking and ethereal at times - not an eat-your-spinach type of film.

I was the Associate Producer on it, and the director Jeremy Dean has kept a blog about the film's ongoing adventure that inspired me to get a blog going about my Alley Pat Film.

Among other things, Jeremy unearthed film Andrew Young getting the crap kicked out of him on St Augustine's streets during the struggle. When Andy was in to be interviewed for Alley Pat he said to me, "I don't remember anyone filming that -- but I sure remember that it happened!"

Lately Andy has been doing a quarterly TV show, Andrew Young Presents, on in about 100 markets. And this week, his crew is in St Aug doing their own hour on the saga, and Andy will fly in Tues and Wed - actually fly to Jacksonville, 90 mins away. There will be an event or two, and maybe a screening. He has rarely been back there since '66.

I was trying to get down there myself to take in all this interesting history - but right in the middle of the work week it'd be tricky, and costly.

Then, an idea. I phoned the Exec Producer and said look, I know St Aug very well, own property there etc, and for the money you'll spend sending a limo to JAX and back to get him, you could fly me down on AYs flight and I'd be Andy's handler/driver from JAX to St Aug and back.

So, done deal, gonna happen, tomorrow. I mean the gentleman is a living history book. I am lucky to get to spend time with him. Should be a very interesting two days.

Will effort to bring you updates here.

Pat is recovering

I am late on getting the word out about this but I found out Pat had a mild stroke about 3 weeks ago. I was trying to track him down because WMLB wanted him to come back for another on air visit. He instead had been in the hospital after some bleeding in his brain - a cerebral hemorrhage - that they caught relatively early after he'd been feeling dizzy. He was in Piedmont intensive care briefly, and then went to an out patient facility for therapy to get his balance back to walk without a walker.

I visited him last week and he was sharp and funny as usual, but a bit slowed down. He was to have been back home by this weekend.

He's lucky; what he had can often be a very bad situation.

Latest on the Alley pat Documentary

I have a press relase on Google Docs you may share:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AZkJ4Z0QQBXdZGc0N3h6cmRfMmY1cGpodDRo&hl=en


and here it is!


"Alley Pat: The Music Is Recorded" celebrates the daring and outrageous era of classic Rhythm & Blues radio with a rich profile of the man who helped start it all, Atlanta trailblazer James 'Alley Pat' Patrick. This laugh-out-loud film is full of infectious music, vintage graphics, and a trove of loopy, barrier-breaking ''airchecks'' by the last surviving DJ from the first black-owned radio station in the USA. WERD-AM signed on in 1949, with studios in the center of Atlanta’s historic Auburn district.

Alley Pat sang and screamed over classic 50s jazz and blues, and imprudently improvised his way through hilarious live commercials. But the film shows that beneath Pat's clowning was some deadly serious business; civil rights pioneers including Andrew Young reveal Alley Pat's quiet but pivotal role in their shared struggle.

His is a life so unique and colorful, it barely fits in one movie. He befriended nearly all the black music greats of the era... as a tour promoter, record label payola man, and as emcee of hundreds of historic concerts and club dates.

The film takes a close up look at the relationship between the "Negro format" radio stations and the new, open-minded white audience of the 1950's. These listeners could privately tune in to the most exciting music of the day via a car or bedroom radio -- while in-person access was denied by segregation laws.

Later, as Atlanta's first black bail bondsman, he aligned with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960’s, and rescued jailed civil rights marchers locked up in the tense small-towns on front lines of the battle. While these protesters came to these dangerous and on-edge cities in a group, Pat - in his role as bondsman - tells of arriving alone, armed with only a suitcase full of money.

The film explores Pat's close friendship with crucial civil rights activist Hosea Williams. It concludes with Alley Pat's touching and over-the-top eulogy at Williams' funeral on the altar of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church.

The film is a seven-year project directed and edited by Tom Roche, a filmmaker with such varied projects as early R.E.M. videos, Space Ghost Coast-To-Coast, and in 2009, Spinal Tap Unplugged. This unique story is told with rollicking humor - and drama - using decades-old radio recordings sonically restored to glistening quality. Yet the film shares a scrappy, devil-may-care quality with the great man's original - and unpredictable - radio shows.

"Alley Pat: The Music Is Recorded" is a new film that revels in Pat's on-air anarchy during broadcasting's pre-corporate era, and brings his socially engaged spirit boldly to life. Alley Pat is the righteously real ''Mouth of the South."


_____________________________________________________

Contact: Tom Roche
Director, ALLEY PAT: THE MUSIC IS RECORDED
troche@crawford.com 404.921.4476
http://alleypattapes.blogspot.com

Alley Pat Visits WMLB

On Friday August 21 2009, I took Pat over to the studios of WMLB-AM. They are at 1690 on the AM dial - they also stream - and are one of the most unique stations in the country. Their midday host, Scott Glazer, interviewed Pat for the better part of an hour, and I got to briefly plug the documentary I've now finished ALLY PAT: THE MUSIC IS RECORDED. Pat was in fine form and told some great stories.

Here is how it all went down.

Pat on WMLB Pt1
Pat on WMLB Pt2
Pat on WMLB Pt3