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!