And the hits just keep on coming!

Hey.... At last, more stuff! How long has it been, dear internet?? Well I am pretty much going 7 days a week with this edit in New Orleans, so there hasn't bee a lot of time to post new Alley Pat Clips.... but now, four new ones. So get clickin' - here we go!

First....

Here we have a little side bar about Kansas City Jazz. Now the film is 98% about Atlanta, but Pat told this KC story one afternoon, and I made a little segment out of it. In the back of my head at the time I was thinking maybe if there is a Kansas City Film Festival, this little piece would help the film win a slot. AS IF this film was going to any festivals at all, ha ha ha. Well, lo and behold, there IS a Kansas City Film Festival, and yes, as of last week WE”RE IN!

Next, in the 1980's Pat used to come with his jazz/R&B on at 3PM on WYZE, after they station had played gospel/religious all day up till then. Inevitably, he'd grab a preacher who was still in the studios, drag him on to his show, and they would tangle....

Next, the secret is revealed. Why the Alley Pat film has “The Music Is Recorded” in its title. I always wanted that line in there, even though it doesn't make a lot of sense on the face of it. Not even Alley Pat himself really gets it. It is kind of a half surreal non-sequitur, tangentially related, but a sort of a draw-you-in mystery. Am I over thinking this?

Finally, A slight departure in style from the rest of the film. Pat's old audio of a hotel commercial, juxtapositioned with contemporary stills of the hotel before it was torn down for condos.

OK back to work. For me. And maybe you.

tom in new orleans

Here's the poster!

The film, proudly was done on a zero dollar budget, but we just spent $43 to have one poster printed, ha, so now I'm in the red. Thanks Darryl for the great design... so very cool IMHO.

Friday is premiere day, and Saturday too

ALLEY PAT: THE MUSIC IS RECORDED will screen at the Macon Film Festival tomorrow, Friday, at 6PM at the Macon Marriott City Center venue, and again on Saturday at the Cox Theater downtown Macon at 3:45 PM.

Im in New Orleans right now, still recovering from an astonishingly wonderful Mardi Gras day, thank you, but will fly in for this, as it is my first film festival screening for anything I've produced/directed.

The pressures of working on the documentary underway here have kept me from updating this blog very much, but I'll be happy to report back on how the screenings went.

78's - Beauty-ful things

Like I mentioned, when you make a movie about a DJ - a movie, not a radio special - you gotta fill the screen with something. And one easy way for some good looking visuals is to go to the record closet for some close up's of 78 RPM records from the 1950's, the 50's being the tail end of the 78 record as pop artifact.

The Courtesy Of A Reply...

It sometimes seems that the proliferation of film festivals follows logically from the proliferation of good-to-excellent quality small-budget cameras and editing gear. Or maybe some festivals, with somewhat high entry fees, are around to make a nice pile of money. Likely, most of the former, some of the latter.

I'm noticing on my Withoutabox page that 4 festivals I entered have now chosen their line-ups. But so far, only 2 Official Selection notices (Macon and Swansea Wales) and zero rejection notices (Oxford MS and Beaufort SC) have arrived in the e-mail box. C'mon Oxford and Beaufort, you can send me a rejection letter, I can take it. It is better than nothing, and I mean that, esp in that I sent over $100 your way to put my li'l film in your consideration queue.

Granted, the last rejection note I got - last year from the Sarasota Film Festival for a different film - turned into a huge goat rodeo. An intern there accidentally sent a generic rejection note to some 300 e-address at once, and put all 300 in the TO field. Oopsie! I sat on that e-mail all day, and finally with some trepidation replied to ALL about our shared grief and woe over our rejection from this minor festival... and there was an outpouring of cyber bonding, and a Sarasota Rejects Fringe Festival was born.

Hmmm, re-reading these Sarasota Herald-Tribune articles remind me of just how much trouble I caused with that last rejection letter.

Maybe Oxford and Beaufort are not overwhelmed, just wise.

OK, lets watch a clip! Here's great two minute clip about how it all began, and how scared Pat was when he first started on the air. As noted previously, there ain't a scrap of surviving tape from the 1950's of Pat on the air. So we cue up Pat playing 50's blues in the 1980's, and line it up with some actual radio schedules from WERD provided by the Auburn Avenue Library Archives here in town... and we are good to GO!

Soapbox, briefly

When I was dreaming up this film, it went through all sorts of conceptual re-makes. And as it was self-produced and edited, I never wrote much down, kept the running order up in my head. It was my intent at one point to spend a chunk of time talking about the demise of local radio that was brought on by the pro-industry communications legislation overhaul/giveaway of the late 90's. Here Pat had been on the air since the 50's serving his community brilliantly, and he was taken off his last station (WYZE) with no fanfare, no goodbye at all, as smaller stations all over the US were consolidated.

But this planned foray in to corporate radio drama put a drag on the film as a whole. I reduced the section to just a passing reference... making my point and moving on.





Stay tuned.... subscribe... many more clips coming.


tom

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!