(60s rock music)
In the warm summer days of August, 1969,
the defining moment of
the American counter culture was taking shape,
a celebration, festival, concert event,
that became known around the world simply as Woodstock.
(60's rock music)
What began as a small music festival,
originally planned for an audience of about 20,000,
snowballed into a major production,
involving 32 of the biggest names in rock and roll
playing to a crowd of nearly half a million people.
It came at a time when America
was desperately in need of hope, change, and peace.
Couldn't we release the bonds
that were constricting our society
at the end of the Vietnam War,
the freedom for women, the freedom for Civil Rights.
It was promoted as
three days of peace and love.
It was camaraderie, it was communitarianism.
Our own festival of rock and roll music.
A team of friends came together,
including Dale Bell.
They had an idea.
They would film it as an innovative documentary.
45 people to 15 cameras, there's 50 magazines,
flat bed editing table.
The new idea they had
gave the film its iconic look.
It's brand new technologies,
but it was the boldness of being able to say, why not.
The rest is rock and roll history.
(60's rock music)
My name is John Wesley Chisholm.
I'm a producer who just finished a film
about the iconic Woodstock Light Bus.
During filming, I was lucky enough
to meet up with Dale Bell,
one of the producers on the movie,
and an unsung hero behind the original Woodstock film.
He was happy to sit down and talk about his memories
of that amazing summer festival.
Thanks so much for meeting with us.
You're welcome, thanks for finding me.
When people say they remember Woodstock,
what I think most of them mean
is they remember seeing the Woodstock movie.
It was a huge hit, and it ensured
the festival's lasting legacy.
It captured the '60s generation of social change
in a single moment, but also in a new way.
But astonishingly, Dale Bell and his team
only had about a week to plan the film.
Where did you hear
that there would be this thing called Woodstock,
and how did this idea, you know what,
we should go make a film of this, how did that happen?
Dale and his friends were creatively inspired
by Aretha Franklin's new single, Respect,
and her stage performance,
which featured three separate images
projected behind her at the same time.
You got three projectors
showing R.E.S.P.E.C.T. on a white wall,
blown away, totally blown away.
They thought, how cool would it be
if we could put multiple images
on the screen at the same time in a movie?
That is where the vision for a concert capturing event
with multiple images came from but
there was a team of people who
were working in public television,
not necessarily only in public television,
who had been in Civil Rights' trenches,
in the Vietnam War, in the Women's Rights Movement,
and they were all hustling around New York.
That's where the idea started to take shape,
documentary filmmakers covering a three-day music festival,
an uncommon approach, but one that could help produce
a more unique film, and a gold mine if it worked.
They looked at me and they said,
but it's a week away.
With the pressure mounting,
Dale needed to act fast if he and his team
were going to pull off the film of a lifetime.
What are we gonna do, and I said,
I will put together as many people as we can.
There was no group gathering until I had 40 people up there.
And planning the logistics is where
Dale's contribution and quick thinking came into play.
They were still building the stage, and I said,
let's have something where you could,
if you were a cameraman, you could put your
elbow on the stage and be like this,
and he said, what do you want,
and I said, maybe a four by eight plywood
the entire length of the front of the stage,
and then plywood underneath,
so that the assistants can work.
With the crew and cameras in place,
focus turned to another crucial component,
all of the film stock it would take
to document around the clock three day festival.
We had $13,000 in the bank.
I said, that's enough to buy raw stock,
several hundred boxes of raw stock,
each box containing 30 rolls,
and each roll containing 11 minutes of cinematography time.
Tuesday, I place the order, and lo and behold,
they had one-tenth, one-twentieth of what we needed.
Without stumbling, Dale and his team
sourced the remaining stock, and in the nick of time.
The helicopters that are coming in
are carrying superstars and musicians, and medical supplies,
and they're also carrying huge boxes of our raw stock
as I pull it in from Los Angeles, from Chicago,
from Buffalo, from Rochester, from Washington, from Atlanta.
That was the most difficult problem.
It was a series of smart choices,
ingenuity, and maybe even some minor miracles
that helped bring the team's vision to life.
Our film was revolutionary.
Not only was it revolutionary, I think, in terms of content,
but it was revolutionary in the way we filmed it.
It was not music alone.
Remember, there were 300, 400, 450, 483,000 people up there,
and I was one who said, to hell with the music,
it will record itself.
This is an anthropological musical pilgrimage experience,
so let's get as much anthropology
into the film as we possibly can,
but the documentary team,
as far as I was concerned, was more important.
Go out and try to find these kinds of stories
that we could weave into the music,
so that the whole
film itself would be a mixture of both music,
which was part protest, and people,
which was mostly anthropology,
and see if we couldn't glom all of this together
at some later point in the editing room.
What Dale and his team captured at Woodstock
was a glimpse into society's raw emotions in the moment,
a microcosm of blending cultures,
stories of humanity, and the yearning
for the quelling of restlessness at home and abroad.
You and your team, out of all the people that were there,
are the few people who were there
to pay attention to what was happening,
rather than just experience it.
What do you think, and were the most
interesting moments?
There were over 400,000 stories
floating in the sea of faces at Woodstock.
Dale, along with his friend and cinematographer,
David Miles, came across one of
the most powerful stories and lasting moments
from the original Woodstock film.
I gestured to the Port-O-San man.
His name is Tom Taggart, and he actually
put his hose into the latrines and picked it up,
and I said, this might be an iconic little moment.
He says, I'm happy to be doing this
up here for these kids.
I have a kid here right now,
and one of my other sons is flying in Vietnam,
and that
coming together
of our protest, our music, our lyrics, our words,
I could hear it, hear it, in what he was saying,
that was the epitome, to me, of what our film was about.
His children have died, one of them died in Vietnam,
okay? Yeah.
Okay, so I had an experience.
It's as though the heavens spoke when we were there.
We had rain, we had lightning, we were scared.
On stage, the towers were blowing like this.
There was a convergence of circumstances
that no one ever could have predicted.
Are we proud of having been involved in this silly movie?
The answer is, of course, of course.
It may change lives, it may change the course of
how we regard our earth, how we respect our earth.
(60s rock music)