Friday, December 03, 2010

AIFF 2010: Andrew Thomas on The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi

One of the perks of blogging the festival is getting to see some of the films on DVD before the festival. One I saw this week is Andrew Thomas' The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi. Guaraldi was a jazz musician whose name sounded familiar, but I couldn't have told you why. Until the notes of Cast Your Fate to the Wind began.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in the film. Once you get settled into the music, the film goes off in a different direction - we have civil rights (Dave Brubeck talks about coming back from WW II and how the black soldiers weren't allowed to eat in the restaurant with the white soldiers in their first stop back in the US). We have the hungry i and Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory. We go to the opening of San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. And we also see Charlie Brown and Lucy. And by the end, we've heard a dozen or more versions of Cast Your Fate to the Wind.

J and I both really liked this movie. So when I said hello to the man in the hat Thursday night at the reception after NightJohn and he said he was Andy and that his film was about Vince Guaraldi, I had lots of questions. After a bit I remembered I had my video camera. So here's Andy Thomas talking about the movie. He does it much better than I and I'm sorry I didn't keep the camera going longer.   He's so completely into the film and how he did it and the interruptions - to do a film about manufacturing nail polish and a German film about spelunking in Italy to pay the bills.




But you'll be able to hear him and ask your own question after  
The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi shows  
Saturday at 5pm at the 
Bear Tooth.  Unfortunately, that's it, the only time it shows. 

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