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