The heart of soul’s legends

There are, indeed, second acts in American life, if one is to believe the simple truths explored in “Only the Strong Survive,” the newest music documentary by celebrated filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.

The film, which opens Friday in Los Angeles, is structured around a single question: What happened to the careers and lives of some of the great soul music acts of the ‘60s and ‘70s, after the spotlight faded? The artists depicted include several who have achieved legendary status, including Jerry Butler, Isaac Hayes, Wilson Pickett, ex-Supreme Mary Wilson and Sam Moore from the soul duo, Sam and Dave.

Soul, which was shaped in the mid-1960s by such labels as Stax and Hi Records in Memphis and Philadelphia International, embodied a rougher, more percussive energy than the slick urban pop of Detroit’s Motown or any of the labels that preceded it. Whereas rock ‘n’ roll celebrated youthful exuberance and angst, and rhythm and blues the voluptuous dangers and delights of the big city, soul music took its cues from the truthful homilies and supplications of the rural church. Naked emotion and truth-telling were its essences.

Each of the artists in “Only the Strong Survive” has a story to tell, some involving great tragedy and loss or a frightful descent into the abyss. Yet, as its title implies, each of these individuals found some core touchstone of salvation, whether in love, faith, family or education, which provided him or her the means of reinvention. . None of them ever stopped making art, even in the bleak years, and the movie is a testament to the redemptive powers of their native talents. In the film, whose title is derived from Butler’s chart-topping 1969 R&B; single of the same name, we discover that Butler returned to school at age 50, after years on top of the music charts. (As a teen, with former Chicago band mates Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, he was one of the founding voices of rhythm and blues in the 1950s.) He entered politics in the early ‘80s, as the Cook County commissioner, but never stopped touring and performing.

“He’s magnificent,” says Hegedus. “He was the first person we went to see at the Apollo in Harlem. We were dying to go to Chicago and see him as the Cook County commissioner, and we kind of envisioned him like Superman going into a phone booth and changing into his music clothes and getting on a bus and going off on the road.”

But of all the soul singers’ stories, the one recounted by Sam Moore is the most shocking. In the film he discloses that he fell hard after the pair disbanded in 1969. “After 12 years of heroin and cocaine addiction, I weighed about 118 pounds,” Moore recalled in a recent interview in Los Angeles, seated beside the woman whom he credits with saving his life, his wife of 21 years, Joyce Moore. “My hair was coming out, I was losing my teeth. I kept the pawn shops in business.”

Once Joyce found him and cleaned him up in the early 1980s, audiences discovered that Moore is as brilliant a soloist as he ever was as part of a duo act. He was inducted, with his “Soul Man” partner, the late Dave Prater, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.

The still-glamorous Mary Wilson of the Supremes seems, at first, an odd choice for inclusion in a film documenting the hard travails and raw emotions that seem characteristic of a soul singers’ life. But all doubt fades when Pennebaker and Hegedus reveal her onstage, belting out a song in extreme close-up, bathed in amber light, her dreadlocks cascading down her face, which is suffused with emotion and drenched with sweat.

“I didn’t step out of the spotlight,” Wilson says, “they took the spotlight off me. That’s what this film is all about.”

Pennebaker (“Don’t Look Back,” “Monterey Pop,” “The War Room”) is an MIT- and Yale-trained mechanical engineer who is acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of American documentary filmmaking. Hegedus (“Startup.com,” “Down From the Mountain”) began her career as a cinematographer and editor, making films for the burn ward of the University of Michigan Hospital.

Pennebaker and Hegedus are married and have collaborated since 1977, when they worked on “Town Bloody Hall,” a film documenting the rhetorical feud between novelists Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer. Three of their eight children, producer Frazer Pennebaker and sound technicians Kit and John Paul Pennebaker, were instrumental in their latest project.

“Our initial budget from Miramax was $500,000,” said Hegedus. “But we were able to bump it up a little to get the rights to the music.”

The limited budget posed some problems for their New York-based production team. “We wanted to get people from different areas of soul music, from Memphis and from Chicago and Philadelphia if we could,” said Hegedus. “But we had to try and see who was coming into our area and see if we could get access to them.” Those same budgetary constraints, however, led to something of a breakthrough.

“This is our first documentary using a digital camera,” said Hegedus. “We took Penne [Pennebaker’s nickname] kicking and screaming from the 16-millimeter camera.” Now Pennebaker declares: “I’ll never go back to film. Never. I don’t even know where my camera is now. The digital camera frees you in many ways you don’t anticipate. Not having to reload every 10 minutes is an enormous jump, especially if you’re doing music, because you can’t interrupt the music.”

In “Only the Strong Survive,” Pennebaker and Hegedus attempted an improvisational style of camera movement that would parallel the fragility, raw emotions and truth achieved by the legendary soul artists. Pennebaker describes a sequence, taped by his wife near the end of the film, in which this objective was achieved.

“Near the end of the movie, Carla and Rufus [Thomas] are singing,” Pennebaker recalls. “They put their arms around each other and as Chris was shooting that, they kind of went behind the mike. So [Chris’] choice is, ‘Well, maybe somebody else is getting them and I’ll trust that,’ but she was so excited to see them together and singing that you see the camera kind of wrench over around the mike and come to grips with them.

“Most editors would find a way to cut it out. I think that Chris may have even herself wanted to cut it out. But when I saw that I just so fell in love with that shot. I love it as much as any shot in the film, because it’s something that is human. It’s ‘soul filming.’ ”

*

‘Only the Strong Survive’

Where: ArcLight, 6360 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood

When: Exclusive engagement opens Friday

Info: (323) 464-4226