The Woodstock of soul

By Emory Holmes II

June 5, 2003 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

Three decades after its debut, the groundbreaking concert film “Wattstax” will be re-released Friday, with its original “lost” ending restored -- a culminating performance by Isaac Hayes, filmed under stadium lights before a packed, nearly all-black L.A. Coliseum audience.

The 1973 movie, by Oscar-nominated director Mel Stuart (“Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”), provides a candid, sometimes joyous, often disquieting window to a moment in African American cultural and political life, particularly in Watts some seven years after the riots, that anticipates the tumult that would re-erupt on many of the same streets in 1992.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. June 7, 2003 For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday June 07, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 4 inches; 143 words Type of Material: Correction
‘Wattstax’ -- An article in Thursday’s Calendar Weekend on the re-release of the concert film “Wattstax” contained several errors. A photo caption dated the concert as 1973; it took place in 1972, while the concert film was released in 1973. The first word in the title of the film “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” was misspelled as “Willie.” The story said that the film’s band “included musicians Al McKay and Verdine White, who would become founders of Earth, Wind & Fire.” Verdine and Maurice White and others had formed EWF in 1969; McKay joined in 1972 after the original lineup disbanded and the Whites reorganized the band. Johnnie Taylor’s name was misspelled as Johnny. The R&B; group is the Staple Singers, not the Staples Singers. Blues musician Albert King was among the performers, not Freddie King, whose first name was misspelled Freddy.

Actor-director Ted Lange (“The Love Boat,” “The Redemption”) is one of the then-unknown voices in the film. “The place was packed; it was like a picnic, an all-day affair. There was a wonderful camaraderie in the audience and I think the film captures that.... It was the black Woodstock, in a sense that Woodstock was what the white hippie deal was, and ‘Wattstax’ was the black soul version of a similar thing.”

Tickets were 99 cents. Proceeds benefited a trio of African American causes, including the Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation, the Martin Luther King Hospital and the then-burgeoning Watts Summer Festival, founded by Watts native Tommy Jacquette and curated by Los Angeles Living Cultural Treasure Cecil Fergerson, also a Watts native. The six-hour concert was the final event of the weeklong summer festival and featured appearances by dozens of now-recongizable figures, including Melvin Van Peebles (“Classified X,” “Le Conte du Ventre Plein,”) Jesse Jackson, Richard Pryor, the Staples Singers, Freddy King and more than 40 acts from Stax Records.

Al Bell, then president of Stax, recalls how the project began with a phone call 31 years ago. Stax L.A. office head Forest Hamilton, also a Watts native and son of famed jazz percussionist Chico Hamilton, suggested that Stax fund a benefit concert to “help the people of Watts, and give our artists exposure in Los Angeles,” Bell recalls.

To head the coordination of the concert and film, Bell turned to his vice president of marketing, the late Larry Shaw. Stax had entered the movie business the year before as distributor of Melvin Van Peebles’ “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” which ushered in a prolific period of black filmmaking.

Hamilton arranged for Bell to meet with the most recognizable name in documentary filmmaking, David L. Wolper, whose preferred director turned out to be Mel Stuart. But by selecting the white Stuart, Bell found that, initially, “we had a lot of educating to do, because they hadn’t been around black folks; that was quite an experience for them.” As Stuart recalls, “It opened my eyes to a world that I was absolutely unfamiliar with.”

An aerial shot of the famous Watts Towers on East 107th Street opens the film with the R&B; hit “Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get,” by the Dramatics, providing both political commentary and soundtrack for a Stuart montage spanning 300 years of African American struggle and achievement in the U.S.

Stuart hired a crew that included 45 African American technicians. Among those receiving their first major film credits were Roderick Young (“Bush Mama”) and Larry Clark (“Passing Through”). Emerging Mexican American cinematographer John Alonzo (“Lady Sings the Blues,” “Chinatown”), who died two years ago, served as supervisor of photography. The film’s band, borrowed from Van Peebles’ “Sweetback,” included musicians Al McKay and Verdine White, who would become founders of Earth Wind & Fire.

After he had reviewed the raw footage of the six-hour concert, Stuart was disappointed. He told Bell and Shaw, “What we’ve got is a concert -- a newsreel of a concert. It’s not good enough.... What I’d like to do is go out into the streets with our crews and get how people feel about the issues of the day, particularly how it’s related to the music: gospel, blues, jazz and so forth.

“We took 12 four-man crews,” he continued, “and we got what I think are some of the great interviews of the time about how African Americans felt about themselves and about the society around them. Not the very rich blacks, not the very poor, but just the average working person, and that’s important.”

Stuart’s crews conducted interviews in barbershops, beauty parlors, in living rooms and on the streets of Watts. Next, he staged “musical interludes” with artists in characteristic environments -- Johnny Taylor in a packed, sweaty Crenshaw dive, and the Emotions in a humble Watts chapel, pouring their hearts into a rendition of the late Rev. James Cleveland’s “Peace Be Still.”

The new footage still wasn’t enough for Stuart, who felt that “what we need is someone who sets up all the scenes. So Larry and Forest took me down to this club way down in Watts and they said, ‘We have this guy and we think he’s pretty good.’ So we walk in, and Richard Pryor is in this funky little club on this little stage.

“This is how it went,” Stuart recalls. “Pryor is at the end of a bar in this little club, and I’d say, ‘Gospel!’ and he’d give me a half an hour on gospel. And OK, ‘Blues!’ and ‘Women!’ and the guy would give you a half-hour off the top of his head. Unbelievable.”

Stuart had to re-shoot Isaac Hayes for the film’s final segment after MGM, which was feuding with Stax, forbade him to use Hayes’ performance of his Oscar-winning “Theme From Shaft.” To get around this, Stuart and cinematographer Alonzo filmed Hayes against a black background on a soundstage. “He wrote a new song for me called ‘Coming Down From the Mountaintop,’ ” Stuart says, “and that was in the picture up until this time. When Saul Zaentz got the rights to the music of Stax, he was able to go back in and they found the piece that I actually did at the concert.”

The restoration, supervised by film restorer-editor Thom Christopher (the “Star Wars” trilogy) was done in collaboration with the film’s distributors, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros. and Zaentz’s Fantasy Inc. Stuart, the recipient of four Emmys, a Peabody and an Oscar nomination, rates “Wattstax” as one of his two greatest achievements. “The first one’s ‘Willie Wonka’ ... and the second one is ‘Wattstax.’ ”

The great thing about ‘Wattstax,’ ” Lange says, “is you caught a moment in time, of what black people feel.”

‘Wattstax’

When: The film opens Friday.

Where: ArcLight Cinemas, 6360 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 464-4226; and Magic Johnson Theaters, Crenshaw Plaza, Baldwin Hills, (323) 290-5900.