Driving Me Crazy

In 1988 Nick Broomfield was asked by a Tele Munich, a German production company, to document the making of a musical show by Andre Heller, ´Body & Soul`, an all-black revival of the music, dance and songs of the thirties and forties. Broomfield agreed under certain conditions (concerning money and schedule) but when he arrived in New York to start filming everything had changed: the budget had been cut down, the time frame changed, and the producers were not willing to keep any of their promises. But instead of walking out of the job Broomfield stayed on and began making a film about his desperate attempts to produce the documentary: he filmed telephone conversations, meetings and verbal fights with his producers, each of his failed attempt to get in touch with the money people, and sometimes he even followed the progress of the show. He did that with a truly sardonic and unforgiving eye - and produced one of the funniest and most revealing films I`ve ever seen about showbiz. If you always wanted to know if all that gossip about showbiz is true or if Bob Fosse was a pathetic liar, then you should see that movie: a delight!

The idea made sense at first: hire veteran documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield to follow the progress of impresario Andre Heller's all singing, all dancing, all black stage extravaganza 'Body and Soul'. The movie would be, in its producer's own words, "a real life Fame" and a document of the creative process, the first step of which was a budget reduction for the film crew from 1.3 million to a miserly 300,000 dollars. With little money and even less time for preparation, the documentary took on a life all its own, becoming a candid backstage portrait of compromise and confrontation, with the film and stage teams clashing head on (sometimes literally; at one rehearsal the camera even collides with choreographer Mercedes Ellington, granddaughter of the Duke). When the musical finally premiered in Munich it was called "the biggest show to come out of Germany since World War Two", an assessment the battle-weary Broomfield would no doubt endorse. His finished film includes only two minutes from the final stage production but nevertheless works as an instructive show biz primer (in ways his producers never dreamed of), charting all the anger, frustration and absurdity on both sides of the camera.