Townshend 'Behind Blue Eyes' Doc Premieres at Telluride — SkimNews
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- Frank Marshall and Nigel Sinclair co-directed "Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes," with Cassidy Hartmann serving as producer, writer and interviewer; the trio previously collaborated on docs about the Bee Gees, Beach Boys and Fleetwood Mac.
- Sinclair, a Who fan since buying the "Quick One" album in 1967 at Cambridge University, was first approached about a documentary centered on Townshend's legendarily unfinished "Lifehouse" project, which then expanded into a fuller biography.
- Townshend sat for a seven-hour interview over two days — surrounded by his electronic equipment from the "Who's Next" period — during which Hartmann said she only had to ask about five questions because he was "completely open."
- The film traces Townshend's evolution from art college to the failure of "Lifehouse" (his attempt to stage a multimedia event with audience feedback), and follows a "straight line" to his departure to become a book editor at Faber & Faber, a move Sinclair called "probably life-saving."
- Despite "Lifehouse" never coming to fruition, the material yielded "Who's Next," which Sinclair noted is considered one of the 10 best albums of all time, while also initiating the use of electronica in pop music.
- Townshend also described his prescient ideas about audience connectivity — what Marshall called "prophetic" — including plans at the Young Vic for direct audience feedback via computers, predating internet-era interactivity.
Why it matters: For Who fans, the doc finally offers Townshend's own seven-hour reckoning with "Lifehouse," the abandoned multimedia concept that haunted him even after it produced "Who's Next"; for the filmmakers, it caps a Marshall-Sinclair-Hartmann trilogy of band docs and gives Marshall — a self-described latecomer — his entry point into Who history via his jazz-guitarist father Jack Marshall's shadow.
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