By Jake Coyle, Film Writer
CANNES, France (AP) --The most often-repeated thing said about the Velvet Underground is Brian Eno's quip that the band didn't sell many records, but everyone who bought one started a band.
You won't hear that line in Todd Haynes' documentary "The Velvet Underground," nor will you see a montage of famous faces talking about their vast influence. You won't even really hear a fairly full Velvet Underground track until nearly an hour into the two-hour film.
Instead, Haynes, the reliably unconventional filmmaker of "Carol," "I'm Not There" and "Far From Heaven," rejects a traditional treatment of the Velvets, a fitting approach considering the uncompromising, pioneering subject. His movie, which premiered this week at the Cannes Film Festival, is, like the Velvets, boldly artful, boundless and stimulating. You sense that even Lou Reed would be pleased by how "The Velvet Underground" refuses the obvious.
"I didn't need to make a movie to tell you how great the band is," Haynes said in an interview. "There were a lot of things I was going to be like: OK, we know this. Let's get right to how this happened, this music, where these people came from and how this miracle of this group of people came together."
"The Velvet Underground," which Apple will release in theaters and on its streaming platform Oct. 15, plums little-seen footage and features a host of rare interviews, including founding member John Cale (who describes the band as striving for "how to be elegant and how to be brutal"), Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers and an early disciple, and Jonas Mekas, the late pioneering filmmaker who filmed the Velvet Underground's first ever live performance in 1964 and to whom the film is dedicated.
"The Velvet Underground" is most singular in how it resurrects the 1960s downtown New York art scene that birthed and fermented the group. Haynes patiently traces the fertile downtown landscape of Warhol's Factory, the explosion of queer New York and how Lou Reed and the Velvets were turned on by acts like the Ramones or the experimental drone music of La Monte Young. Art, avant-garde film and music collide. The documentary, more than anything, is a revelatory portrait of artistic crosspollination.
"You really felt that coexistence and the creative inspiration that was being swapped from medium to medium," says Haynes, who notes such localized hotbeds now seem extinct, a victim of a digital world. "I crave that today. I don't know where that is."
"The Velvet Underground" is Haynes' first documentary. Previously, he's turned to deliberately artificial fictions of great musicians. His "Velvet Goldmine" was a glam-rock fantasia of David Bowie. In "I'm Not There," rather than attempt the impossible task of finding an actor for Bob Dylan, he cast seven.
"When I was doing research on the Bowie of 'Velvet Goldmine' or all the Dylans of 'I'm Not Here,' you come across the real thing," says Haynes. "I always felt like if I'm going to recreate this in a fiction form, I better do something different with it. So you're not comparing it with the real thing, apples to apples. You're in a different language, putting it in a different context and the frame is visible."
Haynes never met Reed, who died in 2013. But he saw him a few times at events like the Whitney Biennial ("I was too scared," he says). And Reed gave his permission to use "Satellite of Love" in "Velvet Goldmine." Laurie Anderson, Reed's widow and a filmmaker, endorsed Haynes directing the film, and other estates, like Andy Warhol's, were supportive.
Footage by Warhol, the only one to previously really document the Velvets, is laced throughout the film. In split screen, the band members' screen tests for the Factory (usually seen as still photographs) play at length, with Reed or Cale staring provocatively out at you.
"The only film on them is by one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. That's so rare and weird. There is no traditional coverage of the band playing live. There's just Warhol films," says Haynes. "We just have art within art within art to tell a story about great art."
More Than A Game: Bringing Sincere Representation Of The Shawnee Tribe To Civilization 7
Shawnee Tribe Chief Ben Barnes grew up playing video games, including "probably hundreds of hours" colonizing a distant planet in the 1999 title Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
So when that same game studio, Firaxis, approached the tribal nation a quarter-century later with a proposal to make a playable character out of their famous leader Tecumseh in the upcoming game Civilization 7, Barnes felt a rush of excitement.
"I was like, 'This can't be true,'" Barnes said. "Do they want us to participate in the next version of Civilization?"
Beloved by tens of millions of gamers since its 1991 debut, Meier's Civilization series sparked a new genre of empire-building games that simulated the real world while also diverging into imaginary twists. It has captivated nerdy fans like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and a young Barnes with its intricate and addictive gameplay and rich historical context.
Choosing among leaders that can range from Cleopatra to Mahatma Gandhi, players build a civilization from its first settlement to a sprawling network of cities, negotiate with or conquer neighbors, and develop trade, science, religion and the arts. Circana, which tracks U.S. game sales, says it's the bestselling strategy video game franchise of all time.
But things have changed since the early days of Civilization. Of course, video game technology has advanced, but so too has society's understanding of cultural appropriation and the importance of accurate historical framing.
Firaxis dropped plans to add a historical Pueblo leader in 2010 after tribal leaders objected. The game incorporated a Cree leader in 2018 but faced public criticism in Canada after its release.
Developers knew that to properly represent the Shawnee leader, they would... Read More