I was drifting on a raft on the Mississippi river, filming some friends when I got a message from my office that RCA wanted to talk to me about a very important project, to film a half-hour of a David Bowie concert in London, but I had to be there by the next weekend. It seemed that RCA had invented a new video disc, called SELECT-A-VISION and I was to make a half-hour film of the Bowie concert to record on it as a sample of the technology. A half-hour was all they needed, or could use. A half hour. It seemed a long way to go for such a short film. With two days to find cameramen and equipment capable of this sort of filmmaking, I found myself ticketed to London with my eldest daughter, Stacy, as producer and my friend Jim Desmond, who had almost single-handedly immortalized Jimi Hendrix at Monterey, as a cameraman. I also managed to get hold of a young filmmaker, Nick Doob, whose first film I had seen and liked a lot, Franken, who I knew could shoot a camera but whose work was virtually unknown to me. There was also the possibility of getting someone in London with a camera and a tripod. When we finally got to the airport, we discovered there was an airline strike and hundreds of people were waiting around for their flights. But there didn't seem to be any planes. As the night wore on it became clear to me that there weren't going to be any planes, and that the only things flying were a lot of unreliable rumours. So we scrounged around and found a bunch of tourists charter-bound for Europe, whom we fell in with, casually sneaking on their plane, which unfortunately was bound not for London where we supposed to be the next day but Rome. When the plane landed the next morning at Fimicino Airport, our tourists companions were whisked away by bus and we were left surrounded by our camera bags on the tarmac outside the terminal. Stacy, by now a travel-hardened producer whispered in my ear. "Dad, why are those men pointing machine guns at us?" We were indeed being encircled by a number of gun-bearing officials signaling us to follow them. There had been an assault on the airport recently and with our surplus army bags filled with cameras we did not look like the average group of American tourists. In fact I could see that we looked every bit like a group of unsurgents headed for arrest. In the terminal it was made clear to me that they were going to put all our bags through an X-ray machine and if there were any odd looking metal objects inside we would have to take everything out for examination. Meanwhile, Stacy got us ticketed on a plane due to leave in about an hour which we would be lucky to make even without the delay of a thorough search of our bags. As we paraded our clunky bags past a very professional looking machine I was astonished to see that there was no sign of alarm, and no flashing lights signalled any sort of undesirable metal content. As I pushed the last bag through the X-ray device and hurried to catch our flight, which was already warming up, I saw the attendant ruefully kick the machine. That's when I noticed it wasn't plugged in.

In London we hurried to the Hammersmith Odeon, where the next-to-the-last concert was about to take place. The following night's concert we were informed would be the very last concert of Ziggy Stardust and the spiders from mars, a bit on which we were sworn to secrecy by manager Tony DeFries, who assured us that only Bowie himself knew this and would reveal it to the audience sometime during the final performance.
That night we filmed bits of the concert, as well as the audience to check the lighting. It was an incredibly exciting concert experience, a long way from the Dylan concerts I had filmed for Don't Look Back. And Bowie himself was stunning. I have never seen anyone turn on an audience, men as well as woman, the way he did that night. The minute he strode out on stage I could see that he was a character looking for a film. Everything was right, costumes, music, lyrics, makeup, and that spectacular audience. I was struck by their almost choreographic attention to the songs. They clearly knew every word to each song and even had their own additions that created a brilliant interaction between Bowie and the crowd.

So after the show we raced over to a Lab to get our tests processed and see what was what. The show was almost perfectly lit the way it was, but the audience was a little dark and I knew they needed to be a huge part of the film, so early the next morning we watched the crowds of kids gather outside the theater and I arranged to have signs put up that asked everyone to bring their flash bulb cameras and take as many pictures as they could. This illuminated the audience a little more and gave them a constant presence in the film, so that when when our cameras were turned on Bowie, you could still feel the crowd with their persistent flashing cameras. Later we would notice that one of our film magazines was flaking tiny bits of magnesium onto the film, leaving tiny bits of glitter here and there, which looked quite beautiful and which we hailed as glitter chrome, our newest contribution to Glam Rock filmmaking.

When we got back to New York we processed the first half-hour of the concert for the RCA disc, and tried to figure out a way for David to mix the sound tracks, which were on a multi-track tape. RCA turned over its gigantic fourth floor studio and had an engineer at Ampex design a device to match multi-track audio to the projected film but it didn't work and after a few fruitless hours of trying to synch up the picture, David gave up and well went back to our drawing boards. What we finally did was mix down the multi-track without film and then to lay it into the film take by take. It wasn't easy but luckily we only had to do it for the half-hour Selectavision disc.
But I really wanted to make a full-length feature out of the concert, and I needed to figure out how to mix all those bloody tracks, while watching the film. There was also the problem of how to pay for such an undertaking. Half-hour films are one thing, and RCA had paid for that, but a two hour feature film with four track Dolby sound is quite another. I tried to get hold of David but he'd disappeared into the great Midwest and although I got occasional calls from small towns suggesting that I fly out and we'd mix the tracks at a radio station he knew about, I could see that I was going to have to do it on my own. Firstly, I needed to get the rest of the film processed, and in a hurry because reversal will turn red if left unprocessed for too long. I got hold of a friend who worked at the Daily News film lab which did their TV news film.

We made an arrangement whereby I would deliver so many rolls of film and some money in a paper bag by way of a bar we both knew of and would pick up processed film and work print when it was ready.

The film looked beautiful and I began editing, but the sound mix was another matter. There simply weren't any sound studios that could mix film tracks the way record companies mixed their records. Film mix studios mixed mono tracks and they did it very well but here I had sixteen tracks which I had to bring down to four if I wanted to have the film in Dolby, which after the success of Monterey I knew was mandatory. The answer was overwhelming but I was no other way and proceeded to get two studio wires to come in and another we designed and wired a simple console capable of mixing the 16 original tracks down to a four track master from which I could make a stereo or four track Dolby sound track. The console took almost six months to complete but when it was done I was able to mix the whole thing in about a week. When I put five speakers around my little screening room, which was about the size of a single car garage, the effect was incredible. I would have screenings several times a week and it was clear that this was an amazing film experience. So I got hold of a small portable projector that could interlock a 16mm film with a stereo track, and started showing it at places like Yale and Buffalo to a large audience just to see if I was on the right track. Was I! It was such a success that I could have gone on the road with that setup and shown that film all over the country. Probably all over the world.