BEFORE: With just four documentaries to go, let's check the leader board, which is substantially different from the way it was just a couple weeks ago. Bill Murray is no longer in the top spot, where he'd been for a while - he's been passed by both Johnny Carson and John Lennon, who have 12 appearances each so far this year. Murray's in second place with 11 appearances, tied with Paul McCartney. Tied for third with 10 appearances each are George Harrison, Steve Martin, Richard Nixon and Conan O'Brien. Dan Aykroyd, John F. Kennedy and Ringo Starr have been in 9 films each, and John Belushi, Michael Jackson and Richard Pryor have been in 8. Elvis, Jack Nicholson, Jackie Kennedy, Adam Sandler, Frank Sinatra and Jason Statham all have 7. And to think Jason Statham held the top spot for months, but no lead was secure with the Doc Block coming up.
Well, that's the kind of leader board you get when you focus on documentaries about every SNL star you can find, with a secondary focus on rock music, because there's footage of the Beatles in just about every rock doc. Bill Murray and Conan O'Brien were also in fiction films in the first half of the year, and you know, every little bit helps.
There are just a few states left to profile, as I get ready to wrap up my "Get to Know a State" feature celebrating America's 250th birthday - and as far as I can tell, I'm like the LAST person still celebrating this, everyone else is SO OVER IT. New Jersey would be the obvious choice here, but of course that got taken by "Flipside" over a month ago, so thankfully I can use the fact that Bruce had a very prominent album with the title of NEBRASKA. Ah, I'm just so clever...
Date admitted to the U.S.: March 1, 1867 (37th state)
Claim to fame: Beyond that Springsteen album, I have no idea. Maybe corn?
Nickname: The Cornhusker State. Ah, see, I knew it!
State Motto: Equality before the law.
State Flower: Tall goldenrod
State Bird: Western meadowlark
State Tree: Eastern cottonwood
State Mammal: Horse
State Dance: Square dance
State Fish: Channel catfish
State Gemstone: Blue agate
State Fossil: Mammoth
Notable Sports Teams: Just minor-league affiliates and college teams like the Cornhuskers
Fun Facts: I don't think they have fun there, just farming. Certain very little of the history regarding Native Americans isn't very fun. Nebraska was the last state to maintain a ban on driver's licenses given to adults who entered the U.S. illegally as children - nope, nothing fun about that either, that just seems spiteful. Nebraska has the largest Czech-American and Danish-American populations, no, there is just no fun to be had. Kool-Aid was invented in Nebraska in 1927, Kool-Aid is fun, right?
Bruce Springsteen carries over from "Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley".
THE PLOT: A documentary on famed American rock-and-roller, focused primarily on his years as a successful musical icon.
AFTER: Really, this is the worst kind of stockumentary (my term, which does not seem to be catching on anywhere) that's just meant to fill up an hour on the Fuse Music network, which means it's only 40 minutes of material and 20 minutes of ads, and that 40 minutes contains about five pieces of actual information, if you're lucky, and the rest is a bunch of music critics giving their opinions and relating stories that they heard second-hand, which may or may not have any basis in reality.
They also repeat a lot of the same points and even the same footage - they have Bruce Springsteen reading a passage from his book that relates a motorcycle ride through the countryside on a snowy night, and honestly the story goes absolutely nowhere, and then they repeat the same footage again at the end, and it's even more meaningless the second time. It's clear they were three minutes short of the required time and thought nobody would notice if they re-ran the piece from the beginning.
Who are these people and what right do they have to tell me stories about Bruce Springsteen's life? Having Bruce tell these stories would make more sense, but they don't have that footage, and there's zero chance of arranging an interview with Bruce to get it. Instead they rely on things he said while appearing on the red carpet at events, and also the absolute worst bits from press junket interviews, which they could get on the cheap.
In my defense, I taped this hour to fill up the DVD with "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple" on it, and I wasn't able to find a real, honest, definitive Springsteen documentary, perhaps it has not been made yet. "Springsteen and I" was a bust, and the one titled "Road Diary" was geared on promoting that specific tour that was going on at the time, 2023-2024. There was that bio-pic, of course, "Deliver Me From Nowhere" which I watched earlier this year, but I think the ultimate, career-spanning Bruce doc has not been made yet. There have been "making of" docs made on specific songs or albums, but that's hardly the same thing.
I'll concede there were a couple of pieces of information about Springsteen that I didn't have before this, one was the motorcycle accident he had two years before getting drafted, which made him unfit for military service. He was therefore ineligible for service in the Vietnam War, so if not for that crash, he might have been sent off to war and then maybe we wouldn't have any Springsteen albums. Well, history is written by the survivors. There's a focus here on Jon Landau, the music critic who declared in 1974 that Springsteen was the future of rock and roll, but there's no mention of John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia Records two years before. Hammond has also signed Bob Dylan 10 years before that - so I wonder if the filmmakers here were confusing Landau with Hammond...
Perhaps the worst sin is going straight from "Born to Run" to "Born in the U.S.A.", as if there was nothing in between in his career. Look, I know you only have 40 minutes or so, and you can't get to everything, but that doesn't mean you can't try. So they skipped over "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and "The RIver" and "Nebraska", three albums that were very important and whose absence in a documentary would probably make Springsteen fans throw a fit. Then there's a perfunctory mention of "Tunnel of Love" and the Oscar for "Streets of Philadelphia" before they move on to "The Rising", which was post-9/11. Then there's apparently nothing really worth mentioning until he plays those Broadway shows in 2017. That's darn near criminal in terms of leaving out important stuff, like a Super Bowl halftime shows, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the death of Clarence Clemons.
So this is woefully, woefully incomplete, and a real documentary on Springsteen is still on everyone's wish-list.
Directed by Jordan Hill (director of "Killing John Lennon" and "Elton John: Becoming Rocketman")
Also starring Clarence Clemons (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Patti Scialfa (ditto), Laura Barton, Terry Christian, Paul Morley (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Jeremy Vine, Jeff Weiss (last seen in "Madonna: Goddess of Pop") and the voice of Brad Mielke
with archive footage of Bono (last seen in "Roy Orbison Forever"), Courteney Cox (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Jon Landau (also last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Nils Lofgren (ditto), Max Weinberg (ditto), Steven Van Zandt (ditto), Barack Obama (last seen in "John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls"), Julianne Phillips (last seen in "Tina"), Elvis Presley (also carrying over from "Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley"), Mickey Rourke (last seen in "Faye"), Sting (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"),
RATING: 3 out of 10 albums not even mentioned here
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