“Wonderful Grace” (2018)
Aretha Franklin followers thought they’d by no means see it: the documentary Sydney Pollack filmed in January 1972 because the Queen of Soul recorded a stay album in Los Angeles. The ensuing file, “Wonderful Grace,” stays the best-selling gospel album of all time, however the trustworthy craved the pictures that had been captured on the identical time. Alas, Pollack’s cameramen had forgotten to make use of a clapper throughout the shoot, making it just about unattainable to marry the images to the sound. Consequently, the footage sat on a shelf for many years, seemingly destined to be one of many nice what-could-have-been movies.
However in 2010, a number of years after Pollack’s dying, momentum started to construct to lastly assemble the “Wonderful Grace” documentary, supervised by producer Alan Elliott, who oversaw the laborious synchronization course of. Sadly, when Elliott was making ready a 2011 premiere, he was stopped by a lawsuit from an unlikely individual: Aretha Franklin. Though the singer had mentioned she “loves” the film, she claimed he’d used her likeness with out her permission, blocking its launch.
After many years of ready for the “Wonderful Grace” live performance movie, it might take one other seven years—and Franklin’s dying in 2018—for the film to lastly hit theaters. It was solely then that Elliott revealed what Franklin’s lawsuit had actually been about.
“At a sure level her niece, who’s now the executor of the desire, got here to me and mentioned she had pancreatic most cancers,” Elliott recalled. “And that kind of modified the perspective on it, to ‘Oh my god, why does she not just like the film’ to ‘Oh my god, we’ve made a eulogy for her’ and so in fact she didn’t need the film out. That grew to become a choice that her household and I made which was to not put the film out over the past three years as a result of we didn’t need her to must undergo that.”
Now out on the earth, “Wonderful Grace” is a becoming tribute to an unimaginable performer. Many people thought we’d by no means see that movie—however like so lots of the examples on this record, it was definitely worth the wait.
