Allan: Well for a lot of reasons. Motown's been so overdone. What are you going to do new in Motown? But that was the whole point--we had something totally new about Motown. It's like, you're married to a woman for 30 years, and then all of a sudden at the breakfast one day, she says, by the way honey, I never told you, but before I got married, I was a neurosurgeon. You'd go, "Well, where the f*** did that come from?!"

Well that's basically what we did. Because people think they know everything there is to know about Motown--it's such a big part of our lives, and the framework of American pop culture. If you say to someone, "You think you know about Motown?", they'll reply, "Oh yeah--Marvin Gaye, Berry Gordy, The Supremes, The Temptations". And all of a sudden, somebody lays on you that you don't even know half the story!

So I think that's why it's had such an impact.

Ed: At any point did you think about doing this for TV, like a VH-1 kind of thing?

Allan: That was our worst-case scenario. Actually, I shouldn't say that. In the beginning, we were thinking about a $600,000 budget, shot in video, kind of thing. But then our dreams expanded. But a lot of the deals collapsed that we got real close on. In hindsight, there's a real sense of destiny in this film. I think those deals collapsed because they weren't the deal that would allow the film to be what it was: we needed a lot of money. Every time when a deal fell through, the budget got expanded for some reason, instead of contracted. And finally, when the budget was right to make the film what it is, the deal finally happened. But a lot of these earlier deals were for smaller, less ambitious films.

Allan: We literally worked fulltime for 11 years, trying to find money. We made over a thousand pitches, and we finally got funded in 2000, and made the movie.

One of the impetuses to do the film, was that I'm a huge baseball fanatic. Field of Dreams had just come out in 1989, and I don't know if you remember the scene where Kevin Costner is asked by Ray Liotta, "Can we come back? It would mean a lot. There were eight of us."

There were eight Funk Brothers left. That's when the bell went off in my head, and I wanted to do something for the guys who had given me all of the information about Jamerson, so I thought, all right, well, let's go.

11 Years of Hell

Allan: You can't believe what we had to go through to get this film made. I saw Hearts of Darkness, the making of Apocalypse Now. Coppola didn't struggle anywhere near what I went through! And I'm not being facetious: I lived like a lunatic for 11 years. I pawned my guitars, or sold them off and re-bought them, hundreds of times.