The idea for the film emerged during a meeting between Jagger and Ashby at a Rolling Stones concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Jagger had some very specific ideas about capturing the excitement of their upcoming tour in support of the album "Tattoo You" and he wanted Ashby's recommendations for possible directors to helm it. Ashby volunteered his own services, which Jagger happily agreed to, and for the director it was a chance to do something different and fun. It was also a welcome distraction from the frustrations of studio interference he was currently experiencing on his production of Lookin' to Get Out (1982), that indirectly resulted in Ashby being denied the opportunity to direct Tootsie (1982) on which he had already spent considerable pre-production time.
Less than a month after Jagger proposed the as-yet-untitled concert film (Time Is on Our Side was an early title suggestion), Ashby began filming the Rolling Stones in concert, first at the Brendan Byrne Arena in Meadowlands, New Jersey. The best footage, however, was captured at the Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona where Ashby ended up directing from a gurney while hooked up to an IV (there are conflicting reports of whether Ashby had almost overdosed from partying too hard or if he had suffered a minor heart attack). For this particular concert Ashby had a twenty camera set-up, one of them placed in a helicopter to capture aerial shots, and his cinematographer team was headed by Caleb Deschanel, Gerald Feil and Garrett Brown, who produced a visually stunning look for the film. Jagger remarked during the editing process that, "There was this really beautiful backdrop of desert and mountains and we had 70,000 people...We filmed it so that you see me singing in front of lots of bright colors, like a painting really, but a helicopter pulls the camera back and you see I'm actually performing in front of a gigantic guitar. I just saw a rough cut of the scene, and to tell you the truth I hadn't thought it would film as spectacular as it does."
As Jagger was the main initiator of the project, it's no surprise that he also emerges as the real star of Let's Spend the Night Together; the other members of the band were less enthusiastic about the presence of the filmmakers - Keith Richards got so annoyed at one point that he almost started a fistfight with one of the cinematographers - but all of the musicians are captured in both intimate and live concert moments which effectively convey why this band is one of the most enduring and popular of all rock bands. Among the musical highlights are Jagger dancing on stage with a female chorus that includes his girlfriend Jerry Hall during "Honky Tonk Women," a raucous "Jumpin' Jack Flash" with Mick being lifted in the air by a hydraulic cherry picker and a high energy version of "Under My Thumb" which effectively uses some of the aforementioned helicopter aerial shots.
Marketing expert Mike Kaplan, a trusted colleague of Ashby, compared Let's Spend the Night Together to Woodstock (1970) and added that, "If The Last Waltz [1978] grossed $5 million, and it wasn't a very good movie, we could gross at least that." Yet, despite finding a European distributor for the film when a rough cut of it was screened at the Cannes film festival, Ashby's concert film was a harder sell in America. The director also wanted to reedit the film for its domestic release - it was released in Germany, Switzerland and Austria under the title Rocks Off! - and distribute as a big screen audio/visual event in the style of an IMAX presentation. "I want to do a road show kind of thing," Ashby explained, "because the film has got a lot of energy in it. Every time I screen it people come up to me afterwards and say, 'My God!' so I want to take a 70mm, six-channel stereo print and put it up where people can have some fun. I want to screen it where people can get up and dance"(from Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel by Nick Dawson).
Eventually a distribution deal was worked out with Embassy Pictures and a few selected theatres actually exhibited a 70mm print with six-track sound of Let's Spend the Night Together but the film was mostly seen in a 35mm version during its brief release. Critical response was mostly positive with Janet Maslin of The New York Times calling it "probably the handsomest rock-and-roll movie ever made," and Variety labeling it "a solid, technically sophisticated concert pic." Some critics were disappointed such as Roger Ebert who wrote that Let's Spend the Night Together is "essentially a concert film - a film recording an "ideal" Rolling Stones concert, put together out of footage shot at several outdoor and indoor Stones concerts. If that's what you want, enjoy this movie. I wanted more." Some also cited the concert movie's less effective moments such as the Rolling Stones' live performance of "Time Is on Our Side" as archival footage of the Rolling Stones in younger days and turbulent sixties newsreel clips play over the music in a self-conscious stylistic device that detracts from the concert experience on screen. Still, as a lavish cinematic record of the Stones' "Tattoo You" tour, the movie succeeds beyond expectation and should please fans of the band. Jagger, in particular, was quite happy with the results, calling it, "a much bigger, more accurate, interesting view of the concert than we'd had before in any film." Unfortunately, Let's Spend the Night Together was not a box office success and concert films have consistently proven to be unlikely box office hits with the occasional rare exception like Woodstock. Nevertheless, Ashby's rare venture into the concert film genre remains an intriguing detour during his beleaguered career in the early eighties.
Producer: Ronald L. Schwary
Director: Hal Ashby
Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel, Gerald Feil
Film Editing: Lisa Day
Cast: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, Ron Wood, Ian Stewart, Ian McLagan, Ernie Watts, Bobby Keys.
C-95m.
by Jeff Stafford
SOURCES:
Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel by Nick Dawson (University Press of Kentucky)
IMDB
