It was well overdue. Since Zappa’s death in 1993 there has been a yawning gap where a film about his life should be, and actor/director Alex Winter found it hard to believe that nothing had been done to fill that space so far.
“It seemed striking to me that there had yet to be a definitive, all-access documentary on the life and times of Frank Zappa,” he said. “We set out to make that film, to tell a story that is not a music doc, or a conventional biopic, but the dramatic saga of a great American artist and thinker – a film that would set out to convey the scope of Zappa’s prodigious and varied creative output, and the breadth of his extraordinary personal life. First and foremost, I wanted to make a very human, universal cinematic experience about an extraordinary individual.”
Alex was granted access to Zappa’s famed vault, a multimedia archive containing more than 1,000 hours of largely unseen and unheard footage. Biographical in nature, the 129-minute film accompanies Zappa from the formative years of the original Mothers Of Invention through to his final performance on guitar in Prague in 1991. It’s a rare treat and one that every Zappa fan will treasure.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
Steve Vai started working for Zappa at the age of 18. In the beginning he was transcribing Zappa’s music - some of which was published in (Munchkin Music, 1982). But in the autumn of 1980, he became a fully paid-up member of Zappa’s recording and touring band and can still remember the level of culture shock that was to ensue…
