Forgotten 1972 Aretha Franklin Documentary By Sydney Pollack Getting Release ("Amazing Grace”)

By Tambay, on March 5th, 2010

Aretha Franklin’s 1972 album Amazing Grace was her best-selling album. Some even say it’s the greatest gospel album ever recorded.

But what few of us know is that the recording sessions on those two nights in January 1972, at L.A.’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, were captured on film by a 4-man camera crew, headed by the late director Sydney Pollack, shooting more than 20 hours of footage.

Now, 38 years later, the footage is being edited and prepped into a concert film for possible theatrical distribution, billed as a film by Sidney Pollack. Interestingly, Warner Bros. once envisioned the film as part of a double bill theatrical release with Superfly! How groovy would that have been?

The studio would later drop the project in September of 1972, not knowing what to do with a gospel concert movie.

Producer Alan Elliott, who had several conversations with Pollack in the year before his May 2008 death, is overseeing the project, working off Pollack’s notes. David Ritz, who co-authored Franklin’s autobiography, told Variety:

“Most Aretha Franklin fans feel this is her greatest work [...] To me, it’s one of the highlights of 20th-century American musical culture [...] We put a lot of work into making the arrangements tight. We brought in all of the traditional gospel values that everybody knew and loved, yet we added here and there sprinkles of what was then modern: Marvin Gaye’s ‘Wholy Holy,’ Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me.’ That’s what made it a universal hit. It combined the traditional gospel with songs by secular artists that did not subvert the gospel message.”

Elliott spent the last two years piecing the project together, stating that Pollack attempted to revive the project several times, but without success. Only a snippet of the footage has ever been seen publicly (in a 1988 BBC documentary).

And now, thankfully, the full feature-length film may finally see a release – if not theatrical, at the very least, on home video. Stay tuned…

Here’s its trailer: