The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus Is Back!

If there was ever a rock and roll film to be seen in the theater with today’s modern enhanced sound and picture this is it!

The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus Is Back!

By Jimmy Steinfeldt

HOLLYWOOD([Perfect Music Today) 3/21/2019—This legendary film is to be re-released on April 1, 2019. I attended a private screening on 3-7-19 at the Vine Theater on Hollywood Blvd in Hollywood CA. The director of this 1968 classic film Michael Lindsay-Hogg and director Brett Morgen ( Crossfire Hurricane) picture) did an excellent Q&A following the screening and Lindsay-Hogg gave a history of making the film:

“After we made the film Mick and Keith saw it and they thought The Who performance was better then theirs. Keith said “It’s not The Who’s Rock And Roll Circus so maybe we should do something about it.” So there was a plan to re-shoot The Rolling Stones segment. But the set had been torn down. Then there was an idea that we do it in the Coliseum in Rome (where the first circus occurred around the year 200 BC.) Some people went to Rome to look at the coliseum and there was kick back from the Roman press ‘Where once lions roared the Rolling Stones now shout.’ We didn’t get the permit. As often happens with Rock and Roll projects, if they lose momentum they don’t come out. Then Brian died, the Stones did Hyde Park with Mick Taylor on guitar, Mick Jagger did the movie Ned Kelly, and then the Stones went on tour. So suddenly a year had gone by and that left this film in limbo. Then they spent a year in France for tax reasons.

The luxurious offices they had in London weren’t needed anymore. So the cans of film were moved to their new much, much smaller office. Ian Stewart who worked so closely with the Stones heard some women talk about throwing the cans of film out since they were taking up space in the women’s bathroom in this very small office. Ian thought, maybe one day someone will want these cans of film. He put them in his van and drove them to his house in the country and put them in the barn with hay all around. When Ian died his wife Cynthia was walking around the property and she went into the barn and she saw these can of film with the labels peeling off. Then Allen Klein was notified. He had the rights to the film and had financed most of it. He had all the cans of film sent to New York and then we began to put it together again around 1989 or 1990. That went on for a couple of years. Then it came out, 28 years after we made it. It was a great hit!”

Mick Gochanour and Robin Klein are the producers of the film. They relate their involvement in the project

Robin: “The new version has been restored from the inter-negative scanned in 4K, restored in Dolby Cinema and mixed in Atmos sound. It’s kind of like a 3D sound. It’s like you are in the circus tent where the film was shot.”

Mick: “I met Allen Klein and I was asked to do a promotional piece about the Godard film Sympathy for the Devil. I was also asked if I’d like to work on a lost film they were trying to find. Robin and I were sent to London to find it and we found it. We already had about half the film since the late 1980s. We used today’s technology for this version of the film. We recreated the space that existed inside the circus tent. We used a dozen mics placed all around and we did it at Capitol Records. There they can place the sound in 120 different places where they turn sounds into objects. It treats space like the real dimensions of a room. What you are hearing is what you would have heard if you were in that circus tent back in 1968. This is based on the mono 3 or 4 track recording with re-channeling of the sound. We extracted sounds using modern technology to separate them and miked it up in stereo as if it were a concert. Fortunately the original recording was excellent done my Jimmy Miller and Glyn Johns. We did the same thing with the picture. We used Dolby Vision to get greater dynamic range.

It will be shown at about 100 AMC theaters over three nights in April and it will be released in May in every platform plus DVD, BluRay, and I believe vinyl with some things that have never been heard before. Also Keith took a clip from this film and put it up on his Facebook page as a gift for the world to see.” https://www.facebook.com/KeithRichards/videos/2299375936747246/

I highly recommend seeing this historic film on the big screen. If there was ever a rock and roll film to be seen in the theater with today’s modern enhanced sound and picture this is it!