MOVIES

Grateful Dead: Long Strange Trip may lead to Oscar gold

Alex Biese
Asbury Park Press

Befitting its title, the documentary “Long Strange Trip: The Untold Story of the Grateful Dead” had its own epic journey to the screen.

The film, clocking in at more than four hours, was released to select cinemas in May 2017 and began streaming via Amazon Prime Video in June.

The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, left, and Bob Weir, pictured by photographer Peter Simon backstage in 1977.

That highly anticipated release was followed by critical acclaim, with the Asbury Park Press naming it one of the best movies of the year.

"Long Strange Trip" is up for a Best Music Film Grammy on Jan. 28 and it made the shortlist of 15 works in the running for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Oscar. Final nominees for the 90th Academy Awards, scheduled for March 4, will be announced Jan. 23.

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This is the culmination of more than a decade of work by the film’s director, Amir Bar-Lev, who enlisted producer Eric Eisner seven years ago.

“Amir and I started this way back when, when the Grateful Dead were kind of a forgotten ’80s band,” Eisner said. “Over the course of production they’ve had an incredible resurgence in the mainstream culture.

“And it’s just a great thing to see such hard work pay off, and not the accolades or the awards, really, but just the fans and the new fans and the people who have just kind of grown to love the film and actually appreciate the band on top of it.”

Eisner, founder and CEO of Double E Pictures, serves on the board of the Asbury Park Music and Film Festival. He gave local audiences an early glimpse into the film via a panel discussion with fellow producers Nick Koskoff and Justin Kreutzmann (son of founding Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann) at the 2016 iteration of the festival.

The film is currently scheduled to screen 2:15 p.m. Sunday, April 29, at the House of Independents, 572 Cookman Ave., Asbury Park, as part of the 2018 Asbury Park Music and Film Festival.

"Long Strange Trip" will screen in two parts with a 20-minute intermission, and will be followed by a panel discussion with Eisner and Kreutzmann. Stay tuned to the festival's official website, www.apmff.org, for all of the latest information on this year's event.

“This movie was completely made by Deadheads at the core,” said Eisner, who first started listening to the landmark California jam band in ninth grade. “We also had a group around us that were not Deadheads, who were kind of able to look at it just as a music film, or at the core really just a film. So the core of us were kind of super fans and then around us not, the combination worked great.”

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The sprawling film, described by Eisner as an "intellectual film about some intellectual artists," is a grand American epic covering the era from before the band's 1965 founding until singer and guitarist Jerry Garcia's 1995 death.

Jerry Garcia, pictured by photographer Peter Simon performing during the Grateful Dead’s first concert with the Wall of Sound on March 23, 1974 at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California.

The film includes some revelatory material, including home movies of Garcia's pre-Dead folk music days alongside lyricist Robert Hunter.

The crown jewel of the film, Eisner said, is never-before-seen footage of the Dead's 1970 European tour, filmed by the BBC when the band opened for Black Sabbath at a U.K. festival. 

“That was the gem of seeing them behind the scenes, interacting with each other as young guys, not staged interviews," Eisner said. 

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Bar-Lev, Eisner said, was originally contracted to deliver a 90-minute film. But while he was at work on the band's story, documentary miniseries such as Netflix's "Making a Murderer" and HBO's "The Jinx" became cultural touchstones and landmark examples of long-form cinematic storytelling. 

The Grateful Dead, pictured by photographer Adrian Boot in Egypt in 1978, with Donna Jean Godchaux (from left), Jerry Garcia and Bill Kreutzmann.

"At one point, Amir and I were watching the archive, and Amir was editing, and we’re saying, ‘There’s no way this story can be told in 90 minutes,’" Eisner recalled. "We then had to go back to the band and say, ‘Look, very organically, like the Grateful Dead, it’s grown into a bigger entity than we could have imagined.’ It ended up being four hours and it’s very Grateful Dead in its organic growth."

But even with such an expansive running time, some concessions had to be made. For his part, Eisner said he wished the film had spent more time on keyboard player and singer Brent Mydland.

Mydland was a member of the band for 11 years until his death in 1990, and many saw him as a key component to the band's commercial peak in the mid-1980s.

Mike Greenhaus of Relix magazine, from left, with producers Eric Eisner, Nick Koskoff and Justin Kreutzmann speak at the 2016 Asbury Park Music and Film Festival.

“I thought Brent was a driving force for the band … and he got his due (in the movie), but certainly if we were able to stretch it out more you could have a whole section on Brent," Eisner said. "We got him in there, but again they really hit their stride, they hit their professional stride in the '80s under the Brent era.

"As (Grateful Dead singer and guitarist) Bob Weir likes to say, they achieved lift-off basically every night with Brent. Again, I’m a huge Brent fan, and there could be a whole movie on him.”

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While it is a vital document of seismic shifts in 20th Century American culture, Eisner said the film has several layers of contemporary resonance.

“There’s much more to the film than a ‘Behind the Music,’ there are a lot of life-lessons in this thing, like the trappings of celebrity, like the (artistic) openness," Eisner said.

"I think the tech community is an interesting one that really embraced it because of the open source stuff and the way the band played off each other is very much like how an open coding system works where one person puts in their input, another person feeds off that input, a third person kind of puts into that input, and that kind of makes the whole.

"And I think ‘Dark Star,’ the song, is a perfect example of that, in that all four (melodic instruments) are playing unique parts that individually don’t stand on their own so much but when all put together create this kind of sum of the parts that’s bigger than the whole.”

Listen to "Long Strange Trip" producer Justin Kreutzmann on a 2016 episode of the Asbury Park Press' "Fan Theory" podcast: