Straight No Chaser, a documentary about Thelonious Monk, will be at the Brooklyn Lyceum on Saturday night at 9:30 in celebration of Monk's 92nd birthday. I worked on an early iteration of this film as an assistant editor at Christian Blackwood Productions in the 1980's. That was my very first job after college (and a year in England and Israel).

Fourteen hours of European concert performances, as well as interviews with Monk filmed in 1967-68 by Blackwood, form the basis of Straight No Chaser.

In the 1980's, Blackwood and documentary film legend Charlotte Zwerin, who co-directed Gimme Shelter and other films with the Maysles, raised money to make this film about Monk. I assisted her when she was editing a trailer to show funders. 

At that time, they were having trouble getting the rights to Monk's music and that was a posing a major obstacle to getting the film made. Christian Blackwood died in the early 1990's before this film was completed.

With Blackwood, I attended Monk's funeral at St. Peter's Church in Manhattan. He filmed the funeral and it was an utterly amazing experience to be there. Our exposed 16mm film was confiscated at one point during the funeral. It was later returned and I believe Monk's funeral is included in this documentary.

Blackwood was a documentary filmmaker and gifted hand-held 16mm cinematographer, who was able to deftly interview his subjects while shooting them. It was quite a trick. Blackwood was an incredibly handsome, smart and charming  man with a special interest in tarnished celebrity and movie history. He was the most debonair of men, very elegant and a wonderful dresser (he wore white suits in the editing room). What a pleasure and a privilege to have worked with such a talented and stylish man.

While he may be best known for Straight No Chaser and film about the making of the Death of a Salesman movie with Dustin Hoffman,  Blackwood directed 80 films, mostly documentaries, over a 25-year career.

All By Myself, his feature length doc about Eartha Kitt, features several of her songs in performance, and
riveting interviews with the singer as she recounts the high/lows of her life beginning with the fact that her mother quickly abandoned and her blacklisting in Hollywood during the Vietnam War. He also made films about the making of films like Private Conversations and Observations Under the Volcano. Other films include, Memoirs of a Movie Palace, Tapdancin', My Life for Zarah Leander, and Roger Corman: Hollywood's Wild Angel.

Straight No Chaser will be at the Lyceum on Saturday night at 9:30.

Believe it or not, I've never see the film which I believe credits Zwerin and Blackwood as co-directors.  I hope to make it over to the Lyceum to catch it. They have a great screen.