In 1967 Lerner produced and directed FESTIVAL, a documentary shot between 1963 and 1966 at the Newport Folk Festival that included performances by the likes of Buffy Sainte-Marie, Donovan, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary, Johnny Cash and Joan Baez. It was nominated for an Oscar.
While filmmakers in the US were making such pictures as WOODSTOCK and GIMME SHELTER, Lerner was in England trying to capitalize on the marriage of movies and music by filming what would ostensibly be the last great concert of its kind, the Isle of Wight Festival. Lerner had already screened WOODSTOCK and didn't like what he'd seen. "That's what impelled me to want to do this film. I thought [WOODSTOCK] glossed over too many things. I wouldn't have said it then, but I'll say it now. I felt, `No, this isn't right. I gotta do the other.' I felt that behind the scenes, there were similar things to what I show in my film. But why should they be impelled to show it? Well, it isn't that they have to, but they were making the point that everything was hunky-dory -- peace & love obviously. And I don't believe it." One would be inclined to agree after seeing Lerner's MESSAGE TO LOVE: THE ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL. A two-hour documentary about a show that featured many of the same performers who played Woodstock (Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Ten Years After, Joan Baez, John Sebastian) as well as a plethora of other big names (the Doors, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Kris Kristofferson, Leonard Cohen, Free, Jethro Tull, E.L.P), Lerner's film focuses on the struggle the festival's promoters faced when hundreds of thousands attendees refused to pay £3 and instead tried to crash the gate. Interspersed with footage of Hendrix laying waste to "Foxy Lady" and the Who turning Mose Allison's "Young Man Blues" into a hard-rock classic, are scenes such as the one in which promoter Rikki Farr screams at the 600,000 people: "And if you come to this country and we hafta charge you three pounds, if you don't want to pay it, don't fucking well come! We put on this festival, you bastards, with a lot of love and you wanna break our walls down and wanna destroy it, you go to hell." Equally adamant were the militant hippies who wanted in free and the stoned freaks who were camped out on "Desolation Row," an area of hillside outside the corrugated fence enclosing the festival grounds. "This festival business is becoming a psychedelic concentration camp," says one of the party crashers. In the end, only an estimated 50,000 paid to see a world-class line-up, spelling financial ruin for the promoters and causing the white-hot tension -- and sometimes open warfare -- that Lerner has captured in his film. Woodstock it wasn't.
"WOODSTOCK glossed over all that stuff," asserts Lerner, "and that was the stuff that really gave rise to the puzzling contradictions in the hippie movement because, essentially, it became a way of making money for a lot of people behind the scenes. I'm not begrudging them, I guess I'm jealous; they made millions off that thing. And everybody talked as if it were a work of charity. Whereas I really made no money."
Originally, the organizers, having seen Lerner's FESTIVAL, merely wanted to screen that film at Wight. When the director proposed to film the concert for a Woodstock-style tie-in, they agreed. Unfortunately, the promoters were to go belly up, and Lerner was left with 175 hours of footage and no backing to edit and release it. Thus, for 25 years, the film -- really, the mid-point between the musical document that is WOODSTOCK and the mayhem that is GIMME SHELTER -- languished in Lerner's possession until Castle Communications and the BBC decided that the 25th anniversary of the festival would make a good excuse to release the movie, which premiered in 1995 at a film festival in San Jose.
In 1980, Lerner produced and directed FROM MAO TO MOZART: ISAAC STERN IN CHINA that chronicled violin virtuoso Isaac Stern's 1979 goodwill tour of Red China. The best scenes involve Stern's tutoring and coaching of gifted Chinese students, and Shanghai Conservatory of Music director Tan Shuzhen's recollections of his travails in the less enlightened China of the 1960s. The film is extremely well balanced, treating Eastern and Western musical culture with equal respect and (sometimes) awe. FROM MAO TO MOZART won the Academy Award.
Lerner produced two more films from the Isle of Wight Festival while waiting for MESSAGE TO LOVE to be released: JIMI HENDRIX AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT (1992) and LISTENING TO YOU: THE WHO AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL (1996).
Nominated for Documentary (Features) 1967: FESTIVAL - Prouducer
Documentary (Features) 1980: FROM MAO TO MOZART: ISAAC STERN IN CHINA - Producer
2 nominations, 1 Award