Originally Posted by
GuitarGeek
According to Wikipedia, there's only about 17 minutes of concert footage in Rainbow Bridge. Something I always thought was interesting is, Mitch apparently had to overdub his drums in the studio, which is why if you watch the concert footage, there's lots of shots that don't match up to what you're hearing (and not just out of synch shots, but I mean things where you can see Jimi on screen, singing what you're hearing, but in the same shot Mitch is playing something different than what you're hearing). So much for "You can't overdubs drums on a live album".
Anyway, the Wikipedia page says that producers wanted to make a "youth film", with it being an "anti-Easy Rider", i.e. showing something more positive. But what I think they did they did was they improvised a film around a model named Pat Hartley. At one point, it was supposed to be a "psychedelic Candid Camera", i.e. they were gonna set up situations with Pat, and jsut filmed whatever happened. And I think that must be what they did: they just filmed "whatever happened", and then made a 2 hour film out of it, about 17 minutes of which is Jimi playing live. I thought The Beatles demonstrated with Magical Mystery Tour that "filming whatever happens" isn't a good way to go about making a movie.
But yeah, I think the reason I felt ripped off was the package of the VHS edition I bought had all these pictures of him on the cover, making it seem like it was "Jimi Hendrix" film, which as I said, it really isn't. It would be like calling National Lampoon's Vacation "a John Candy movie", or referring to The Pink Panther Strikes Again as "a Omar Sharif movie". And not only isn't Jimi not featured for most of the film, but when he does finally appear, there's this long, boring conversation he's having with these other people, it's like "When does he start playing some music?". Then there's "fantasy sequence" where Jimi assassinates this guy who looks like an escapee from a Gregg Allman look alike contest. It's like "Who the frell is responsible for this mess?!"
Bookmarks