Girl Groups (1983) Review

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Girl Groups (1983) ReviewI am the credited director and co-producer of this documentary. I was surprised to see that Amazon actually has the video, I thought it was long gone. No DVD's, too bad. I drifted onto Amazon because a good buddy of mine loved this era and I wanted to get a copy for him. Glad to see that Girl Groups, The Story of a Sound still lives, such as it is.
This film took almost a year of my life, a very stressful year at that since it is always difficult to juggle the creative storytelling aspect of making a film with the realities of budget and music/clip clearance. We went to ABC for footage from the show, Hullabaloo that they did not even know they had. We dug up stuff in Detroit. I flew there for a blizzard that winter and found footage from a local afternoon program, Teen Town that was Detroit's local American Bandstand. That stuff was sitting in a damp basement at a TV station in Windsor, Canada on two-inch video, long extinct even then in 1982. This is the station where Soupy Sales got his start for you trivia fans out there.
I conducted all the interviews and must say I fell into major crush with Darlene Love. What a sweetie and I could listen to her sing all day long. As Darlene would say, "She had a voice on HER!" Mary Wilson was a most classy lady, and Arlene Smith was also such a beautiful person - she had voice on HER! Ronnie Spector was lots of fun.
Lieber and Stoller were such cool guys, sitting on top of the world, playing pool in an apartment on Park Avenue. They were such good friends and seemed to really have enjoyed themselves while making music history. Ellie Greenwich was a great story teller, especially about those bad girls from Queens, the Shangri-las.
When I look back to that one year making Girl Groups, despite the difficulties, I never once got tired of the music, and in the editing room in the Brill Building where all that stuff happened in the first place, we must have seen the show 100 times, maybe more. Grahame Weinbren and his team did an amazing job making it what it became, as all great editor/filmmakers do. Grahame had a thing for cheese sandwiches, something I never would ever think of eating before or since then, but every day we'd be chomping on these giant cheese sandwiches from Smilers. Swiss cheese on rye, mayo. How's your cholesterol, Grahame?
One reviewer mentioned that the Supremes sequence in the film was too long. I was always thought so, too, but we had to buy a minimum of ten songs from Motown. At that time, Motown had never licensed any
of their music to any entity outside of Motown. We were the first and it took forever to make the deal with them. Our attorneys closed the deal with Motown, we sent them what we agreed upon, and the masters didn't come. We kept on having to postpone the final mix until those masters showed up, which of course finally did, but not before we ate all the swiss cheese in Manhattan. There was major stress at every turn on this project, but nobody cares about that because the end result was good.
Stephanie Bennett's Delilah Films deserves all the credit for having the guts to begin a project way under budget, but to get what we needed when we needed to have it. Stephanie was always the warrior/producer, fearless, tough, a get-it-done-gal. A great co-producer to have. Cheers, Steph, wherever you are!!!
Steve AlpertGirl Groups (1983) Overview

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