"Can We Come Back? It Would Mean a Lot"
Ed: Why was it so hard to convince people of the film's viability?
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."
Article comments
1 - Philip Walker
I read that Allan slutsky was writing a biography of Junior Walker - is this true.
Please let me know
Regards
2 - Mac Diva
Barry Gordy did work on a car assembly line in Detroit briefly. It was sometime between his prize fighting career and when he penned his first hit for good friend Jackie Wilson.
I think the Motown assembly line myth is somewhat cliched. There is too much variation in how Motown acts sound for it to be really true. Phil Spector's wall of sound is more formulaic. As was Philadelphia International Records' sound later. What Gordy did was organize. He made acts fit a fairly rigid schedule of recording and performing. Some of the best, such as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, rebelled. They were not suited to regimentation.
The last word I had on the Funk Brothers was that they have fallen out with their 'discoverers,' i.e., the men who brought them out of obscurity. Litigation was in progress.