Zappa (2020)
dir. Alex Winter
Rated: N/A
image: ©2020 Magnolia Pictures
There’s a tradeoff made when producing an authorized work of art examining the life and career of a famous person. The documentary Zappa, which focuses on the life and times of musician, filmmaker, and iconoclast Frank Zappa, makes that tradeoff with mostly successful results. Director Alex Winter – an actor who moonlights as Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the Bill and Ted movies – had full access to Zappa’s extensive personal archives for his film. The extensive amount of concert video, behind-the-scenes home-movie footage, and interview archives allow Winter to paint a portrait of Zappa – who died from prostate cancer in 1993 – that feels exhaustive and intimate.
The danger with authorized biographies is the risk for them to slip into hagiography. The biographer might smooth over some of the rough edges of a subject in an effort to keep in the good graces of those offering the unfettered access. Zappa doesn’t shy away from some of its subject’s negative qualities. We learn about Zappa’s serial philandering and his tendency to treat his musical collaborators like props who only existed to fulfil his vision. There are darker strains to Zappa’s work, though, that Winter fails to explore. The enfant terrible creative genius, who used satire and comedy in his music to great effect, often incorporated sexist-bordering-on-misogynistic lyrics and racist cultural appropriation into his art. Winter looks the other way from all this, and his film suffers for it.
Zappa is a conventionally styled documentary. It follows the arc of Frank Zappa’s life from beginning to end in straightforward fashion. We learn about his childhood living on a military research base in Maryland, where his father worked as a scientist. The base held chemical weapon stockpiles, mustard gas among them, and Zappa suffered from asthma and other respiratory issues, causing the family to move cross-county in an effort to improve the young Frank’s health. In archival interviews, we hear Zappa explain how living on that base instilled a terror in him. Every home was required to have gas masks on hand, in case the tanks storing the noxious chemical weapons failed. Winter resurfaces this theme again and again as he highlights concert footage and album art from Zappa’s career that featured gas masks.
The real strength of Zappa is Winter’s style. The director, who is also credited as writer, teams up with editor Mike J. Nichols to craft a free-wheeling and vibrant narrative. There’s a playfulness present as Zappa charts the teenaged Frank discovering music and forming The Blackouts, a racially diverse band – unheard of in 1956 – which quickly succumbed to the scorn from his small-town California community.
Zappa’s first brush with the law, when the tiny recording studio he bought in Cucamonga, California in the early 60s was raided by police, left an indelible stamp on the artist.
The 20-something Zappa was approached by a man wanting a pornographic film produced for a stag party. When Zappa told the man that he didn’t have the money to produce a film, but that he could make an audio recording of people having sex, which he faked, his studio was seized and he was eventually sentenced to three years – all but ten days suspended – plus probation. His anti-authoritarian leanings were, if not born, solidified during this time.
It’s an enlightening tale, all told by Zappa. The first thirty minutes or so of the picture uses only Zappa interviews to shape the story. Winter educates us by letting his deceased subject speak first in his own words. Later we get interviews with those who knew, worked with, and loved Zappa. His widow, Gail, who passed away in 2015 as Winter was working on the documentary, talks about the sometimes-uneasy relationship she had with her husband, who used his extensive touring schedule to indulge in sex with groupies while on the road. One poignant sequence relates Zappa’s unexpected hit in the early ‘80s with the song Valley Girl. The song was a collaboration with his daughter, Moon Unit, when she slipped a letter under her dad’s recording studio door introducing herself. The fourteen-year-old saw so little of her father, she felt like she didn’t know him.
Artists like Alice Cooper, Steve Vai, and Mike Keneally describe what it was like to work with and for the exacting artist. The film does an outstanding job of relating Zappa’s true genius. He was more a composer, the film tells us, than a rock musician. In his formative years, the likes of Beethoven didn’t interest him. Instead, he gravitated to an avant-garde artist like composer Edgard Varèse, whose atonal, discordant orchestral work inspired Zappa’s own compositions.
One interviewee describes Zappa’s process of trying to make the perfect reproduction of what was in his head, and in archival footage, Zappa talks about the nature of others enjoying his work. He wanted a good recording of his idiosyncratic music for his own pleasure. If others heard it and liked it, that was a bonus, but, he stressed, incidental to his real goal. That sentiment is echoed in his thoughts on the music industry. Any decision made based on how much money you can make isn’t an artistic decision, it’s a business decision, he said. That guiding principle led to a financially unstable but ultimately artistically fruitful career, one with integrity.
Winter covers a lot more in the eventful life of Frank Zappa than what I’ve related here: His months-long convalescence after a deranged fan threw him from the stage during a concert, breaking his leg; his legendary defense of artists’ free speech rights during the censorship campaign of the Parents Music Resource Center crusade of the 1980s; his transformation into cultural icon in places like the Czech Republic after that nation threw off Soviet rule during the 1989 Velvet Revolution. That’s just a taste of what Winter explores in Zappa.
On a personal note, as a conditional fan of Frank Zappa, Alex Winter also captures the off-kilter exuberance of the artist’s work. I’m a relative tourist when it comes to his catalog; I own only five of his albums. The documentary tells us in a closing bit of text that the prolific Zappa released a total of 62 albums during his career, and that 53 additional albums have been posthumously released by his estate.
Zappa used crude humor and imagery to skewer sacred cows with his satire. He wasn’t always punching up, though. The cover of his concept album Joe’s Garage features Zappa in black face and one of the songs, Crew Slut, includes the stomach-turning line, “Don’t make a fuss, just get on the bus.”
That same album, though, also contains one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. It’s called Watermelon in Easter Hay, and its elegiac wistfulness perfectly represents a certain existentially mournful quality running though Zappa’s work. The documentary Zappa translates that quality and some of the contradictions of the man who incorporated it into his work. Winter’s movie doesn’t challenge its subject where it really counts, but it does succeed in giving us a view into Zappa’s rich artistic life.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- If you’re a fan of Frank Zappa at all, you should love this movie. Even if you aren’t, but you enjoy really well-crafted, immersive documentaries, Zappa is hard to beat. I wish Winter had gotten a little more confrontational, but I admire what he’s done here.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- My road to Zappa fandom came in two waves. The first was when a high school friend, Chuck, lent me his copy of Sheik Yerbouti. Rat Tomago, City of Tiny Lites and Yo’ Mama all have mind-blowing instrumental sections. Zappa’s Dylan impression in Flakes is hilarious. I let things simmer for a few years before a college friend, Scott, walked me through his own Zappa obsession. That’s where I picked up Freak Out!, the debut album from The Mothers of Invention, and his solo albums Apostrophe (‘), Over-Nite Sensation, and Joe’s Garage. That last one is…problematic, but it’s a concept album and the overarching story and the musicality of the album are both brilliant.
- The doc goes down a brief rabbit hole with stop-motion filmmaker and artist Bruce Bickford. The work of his that we see in the film is stunning. Zappa worked with Bickford while he was recovering from his broken leg. The story of how they met (which the documentary covers) is great.
- All the archival concert footage in the film is excellent, and the legendary group Kronos Quartet even turns up (they worked with Zappa toward the end of his life) to perform a Zappa piece.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw Zappa through a screener link. It is available for rent through most online streaming outlets.