Woodstock (film)

Woodstock
Film poster by Richard Amsel
Directed by	Michael Wadleigh
Produced by	Bob Maurice
Edited by	Michael Wadleigh Martin Scorsese Stan Warnow Yeu-Bun Yee Jere Huggins Thelma Schoonmaker
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release dates	March 26, 1970 (1970-03-26)
Running time	184 minutes 225 minutes (1994)
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$600,000
Box office	$50 million[1]

Woodstock is a 1970 American documentary of the watershed counterculture Woodstock Festival which took place in August 1969 near Bethel, New York. Entertainment Weekly called this film the benchmark of concert movies and one of the most entertaining documentaries ever made.^[2]

The film was directed by Michael Wadleigh. Seven editors are credited, including Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese, and Wadleigh. Woodstock was a great commercial and critical success. It received the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Thelma Schoonmaker was nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing, which is a quite rare distinction for a documentary film.^[3] Dan Wallin and L. A. Johnson were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Sound.^[4][5] The film was screened at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, but wasn't entered into the main competition.^[6]

The 1970 theatrical release of the film ran 184 minutes. A director's cut spanning 225 minutes was released in 1994. Both cuts take liberties with the timeline of the festival. However, the opening and closing acts are the same in the film as in real life; Richie Havens opens the show and Jimi Hendrix closes it.

Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock was also released separately on DVD and Blu-ray.

In 1996, Woodstock was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". An expanded 40th Anniversary Edition of Woodstock, released on June 9, 2009 in Blu-ray and DVD formats, features additional performances not before seen in the film, and also includes lengthened versions of existing performances featuring Creedence Clearwater Revival and others.^[7]

Artists

Artists by appearance

* studio recording from an album by the artist
** director's cut only, not in the original theatrical release

Artists omitted

Reception

Woodstock received universal acclaim from newspaper and magazine critics in 1970. It was also an enormous box office smash. The May 20, 1970 edition of Variety reported it was doing well in its third week in Chicago and San Francisco.^[8] (The trade paper used the insider term "lap" to mean "week" in the headline that cited Woodstock's $52,000 profit in Chicago.)^[8] In each of those metropolitan areas the movie played at only one cinema during that week, but many thousands showed up.^[9] Eventually, after it branched out to more cinemas including more than one per metropolitan area, it grossed $50 million in the United States. The budget for its production was just $600,000,^[1] making it not only the sixth highest-grossing film of 1970 but one of the most profitable movies of that year as well.

Decades after its initial release, the film earned a 100% "Fresh" rating on the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes.^[10]

Roger Ebert added Woodstock to his "Great Movies" list in 2005.^[11]

Subsequent editions

25th Anniversary "Director's Cut" (1994)

Upon the festival's 25th anniversary, in 1994, a director's cut of the film — subtitled 3 Days of Peace & Music — was released. It added over 40 minutes and included additional performances by Canned Heat, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix's set at the end of the film was also extended with two additional numbers. Some of the crowd scenes in the original film were replaced by previously unseen footage.

After the closing credits — featuring Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "Find the Cost of Freedom"^[12] — a list of prominent people from the "Woodstock Generation" who had died is shown, including John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mama Cass Elliot, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Max Yasgur, Roy Orbison, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Butterfield, Keith Moon, Bob Hite, Richard Manuel, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. It ends with the epitaph to the right:

40th Anniversary edition (2009)

On June 9, 2009 a remastered 40th-anniversary edition was released on both Blu-ray and DVD, available as both a two-disc "Special Edition" and a three-disc "Ultimate Collector's Edition". The film was newly remastered and provided a new 5.1 audio mix. Among the special features are two extra hours consisting of 18 never-before-seen performances from artists such as Joan Baez, Country Joe McDonald, Santana, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat and Joe Cocker; five of the artists from this group (Paul Butterfield, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead, Johnny Winter and Mountain) played at Woodstock but had never appeared in any film version.^[13]

Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music - The Director's Cut, 40th Anniversary Revisited (2014)

Same version of the main movie, but some of the bonus items now in HD on Blu-ray. Also contains exclusive bonus tracks only available from special retailer versions from the last edition.^[14]

Cultural references

In the science fiction thriller The Omega Man (1971), Colonel Robert Neville (played by Charlton Heston) is seen traveling to a movie theatre in Los Angeles to screen the film for himself alone. Woodstock had been a recent film debuting prior to release of The Omega Man, and had been held over (continuously run) in some theaters for months. Neville darkly remarks the film is so popular it was "held over for the third straight year". As he repeats some of the dialogue verbatim, it is clear that Neville has repeated the ritual many times during the two years that he has believed himself to be the last man alive on Earth. Referencing the ground breaking, never before made, nature of the film Neville wryly reverses it to "they don't make films like that any more", a platitude common because of a new style of films emerging at the time.

See also

• List of American films of 1970

References

Further reading

• Kato, M. T. (2007). From Kung Fu to Hip Hop: Globalization, Revolution, and Popular Culture. SUNY Press. ISBN 0-7914-6991-3.  Cf. pp.82-onward & various.
• Saunders, Dave (2007). Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties. London: Wallflower Press. ISBN 1-905674-16-3. 
• Bell, Dale, ed. (1999). Woodstock An Inside Look at the Movie that Shook Up the World and Defined a Generation. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 0-941188-71-X. 

External links

• Woodstock at the Internet Movie Database
• Woodstock at the TCM Movie Database
• Woodstock at Rotten Tomatoes
• Film review. Chicago Sun-Times.
• Film review. DVD Times.