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."


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