Giants to Their Fans

Peter Shapiro was walking on air as he watched a special performance by B.B. King, Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio and the hip-hop band the Roots, high-fiving everyone around him.

But the experience got even better for him the next day when he checked his voice mail. On it was a message from King thanking him for what the blues legend called “the most fun” he’d ever had as a performer.

Shapiro wasn’t only a fan at the Olympic Auditorium session. He was the organizer of the one-time-only performance, meant to be a larger-than-life experience--literally. He and his brother John are the producers of “All Access,” a film using the huge Imax format to take fans both on stage and behind the scenes of a series of rock and pop performances set up especially for the project.

Opening Friday at many Imax theaters in North America, including those at Universal City’s CityWalk, the Irvine Spectrum, Ontario and Santa Clarita, the movie features performances by such acts as Sting, the Dave Matthews Band, with special guest Al Green, Santana with Rob Thomas, Kid Rock, Moby, Macy Gray, Sheryl Crow and a sprawling funk session by George Clinton with Mary J. Blige. Throughout, the performances are bridged by looks at the work that goes on before a show and insights from the artists.

The idea of the King-anchored session in particular was to create a special event. These musicians had never played together before, but once they started it went beyond expectations. The ensemble did three takes of the song, each hotter than the last. And when they’d finished the last take, King himself wasn’t ready to quit and started up a whole new jam just for fun.

“As a kid we used to go to the revival meetings,” he said in his trailer after the shoot. “One of the reasons for going was they had lots of little girls. But when the [preacher] got going, I just felt like running. And that’s how this was tonight.”

Both of the Shapiro brothers came to film via the music world. In the early ‘90s Peter made a documentary about following the Grateful Dead on the road, and for six years has been the owner of the New York music club Wetlands, known as a haven for jam bands and acts on the way up. Jon worked as a recording engineer before moving into film, where he produced “Richie Rich” and is now developing a “Curious George” movie. But the scale of the Imax project was literally new for them.

“Wetlands deals with baby bands, emerging bands on a lower level,” Peter says. “So it’s interesting for me to be working with acts on a bigger level in the film. But it’s all about the same thing--showing the magic of live music. And when there was an opportunity to take the live music to Imax, the most advanced film and audio format, we really felt there was anopportunity to create the next level of the concert film.”

While Imax is best known for its nature and thrill-ride spectacles, it has dealt with rock before, most notably putting Mick Jagger’s lips on its giant screens in 1991’s “The Rolling Stones at the ‘Max.”

With that in mind, the Shapiros wanted to go another step.

“The Stones film is a great film,” Peter says. “But we felt the power of Imax was to take you to where you can’t go in real life. You can still see the Stones. We wanted to create a concert that doesn’t come to town, a show that doesn’t exist, but that you can see in a way that feels like you’re actually there.”

That appealed to Rich Gelfond, co-chairman and co-CEO of Imax.

“The Rolling Stones film was a huge success,” he says of the project, which was seen by 1.3 million people. “And if you think about the best Imax films, ‘Everest,’ which takes you to the highest mountain, ‘Space,’ which takes people to the space shuttle, or ‘T. Rex,’ which took people back to the time of dinosaurs, they’re something experiential. We think taking people behind the scenes and feeling you’re part of the music will play off our strengths.”

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Gelfond and his partner, Brad Wexler, in turn, were able to take the idea to Certs, which liked it enough to underwrite some of the production costs and get involved in the marketing campaign in exchange for a “presented by” credit and several not-too-subtle product placements in the film itself.

But rock ‘n’ roll is not Everest or dinosaurs, and the history of rock films has been decidedly mixed. That was the challenge for the Shapiros and director Martyn Atkins, a longtime director of music videos and films, but a newcomer to the Imax format.

“One thing I don’t like about the Stones film is, there’s no intimacy,” he says. “It’s a stadium concert, and you never get into that privileged position of seeing everything close up. The spectacle of this film is you’re going to see that stuff. I liken it to making more of a pop art statement, taking things that are ordinary and taking them out of context so they’re extraordinary. There are some shots where you see knobs on a guitar 70 feet tall. Regular Imax filmmakers shy away from that. It’s not the experience of flying through a canyon with Imax, but a scale of something you don’t see every day.”

But will audiences pay to see it once? The film is a bit of a hodgepodge of styles. Someone drawn by Sheryl Crow (who does a solo acoustic performance of “If It Makes You Happy”) might not care for Kid Rock’s rowdy rap-rock. And a fan of Sting (in a segment that segues from a sound-check rehearsal of “Desert Rose” to a real concert performance) might have less interest in Moby (who in addition to performing “Porcelain” is seen waking up in his hotel room and discussing music while driving to the gig).

“It’s kind of a Whitman sampler--you bite into something and you may not like it, but others you will,” says Jon Shapiro. “But the birth of ‘All Access’ was that with the finest visuals and best audio we could create an event people will want to go out and see rather than just a garden-variety television concert.”