An e-mail exchange with John Lennon’s ex-lover May Pang set Seth Swirsky on a crash course in documentary filmmaking.

The singer-songwriter with both a bevy of chart toppers and a respected solo career to his credit, met Pang about six years ago following an email introduction. Swirsky asked Pang if they could take an impromptu tour of Lennon’s infamous “lost weekend” hot spots circa the early 1970s.

Camera in hand, Swirsky captured some of Pang’s memories on film as merely a video scrapbook, nothing more. He figured he might make a short film from the experience – “A Day with May in LA” sounded about right.

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But when he started quizzing other rock luminaries on their favorite Beatles anecdotes, like Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues and Denny Laine from Wings, he realized he had the makings of a documentary.

“I’m an artistic person,” Swirsky tells Big Hollywood. “I never know exactly what I’m doing at any moment. I allow that process to occur.”

“Beatles Stories,” the culmination of six years of guerilla interviews, recently had its world premiere April 3 at the European Independent Film Festival in Paris. The film, dubbed an “epic and timeless masterwork” by director Cameron Crowe, lets the famous and not so famous share their connections with the Fab Four.

Swirsky didn’t want to hear people talk about a Beatles song playing during their high school prom. He wanted more personal stories, tales that illuminated the band’s influence as well as the speakers’ hearts. (more…)

I’ve been a fan of Comedian Nick Di Paolo ever since seeing him on Comedy Central’s “Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn“ some 7 or 8 years ago. His humor was cutting, politically incorrect, and truthful. In fact, it’s been through listening to Di Paolo that I’ve learned that good comedy is funny because it’s based on truth.

However, Di Paolo has another quality which may be even more valuable than his ability to make people laugh, and that’s his love for this country. He supports the troops, he believes in “American Exceptionalism,” and he understands the dangers that lurk behind the current administration’s attempts to Europeanize the United States of America. Thus it goes without saying that it was a thrill for me to interview Di Paolo for BigHollywood, as it presented me with an opportunity to enjoy the best of two worlds: one of stomach-cramping laughs and one of pride in America.

AWR: Compared to other people in the entertainment industry, your views are often labeled conservative or libertarian. Did something happen in your life that drove you toward a more patriotic position – a greater appreciation for this country – or have you always held such convictions? (more…)

Representative Boehner wants an apology from Sir Paul McCartney for his remarks about President Bush. I’ll take that one step further: Not only should he apologize, we should take away his Gershwin Award. I also think the Queen should ask him to relinquish his Knighthood.

In a coy, condescending remark, Paul implied that President Bush doesn’t know what a library is. Perhaps the decades of a vegetarian diet has started to cause neurological damage to Sir Paul. I know that he was probably just recycling a Bob Hope classic, but President Bush was married to a librarian. He must have some remembery of that mysterious place where Laura used to work.

Of course, perhaps Paul doesn’t think about a wife’s career choice as being valid. Paul’s last wife claimed to be a Model and a Nobel Prize nominee, but turned out to be a prostitute and a compulsive liar. (more…)

The Brits, as we all know, have a thing about “class.” For example, your accent not only denotes what part of the country from which you hail, but whether you are “working class,” “middle class,” or “nobility” and all things in between. And if you have the “wrong” accent, good luck getting accepted into certain circles.

For someone who comes from a nation that’s still so hung up on class, Paul McCartney recently demonstrated that he has none.

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McCartney – excuse me, Sir Paul McCartney, obviously a classy guy – was in the East Room at the White House, receiving the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Despite the non-political nature of the event, which featured McCartney himself and other musicians performing his songs in front of a select audience (including the President and First Lady), somehow Paul couldn’t hold back a snarky remark about Obama’s predecessor:

“After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.”

Nice. (more…)

As I am a foreigner, the first I ever heard about the Super Bowl’s tradition of mid-show entertainment was the now notorious Janet Jackson nipple incident whereby Justin Timberlake ‘accidentally’ unleashed Ms. Jackson’s breast upon millions of unsuspecting Americans. I was living in Moscow at the time and even the Russians were quite obsessed by the role of Ms. Jackson’s mammary glands in a sport none of them played or cared about. 

Six years later and it is clear that the Super Bowl’s organizers are still terrified of Janet Jackson’s nipple, that it comes to them at night and haunts them in their sleep, threatening to embroil them in scandal and to lose them millions in sponsorship deals. For what else can explain the entertainment decisions made by the Masters of the Bowl ever since that fateful Sunday afternoon in February 2004? 

Let’s take a look at who has played in the years since:  (more…)

Forty years ago this week the cover photo for the “Abbey Road” album was taken, representing the final walk of the Beatles as a rock group.

Fourteen days later, on August 22nd, they posed together for a final promotional photo shoot, which was their last appearance together at any Beatles event. Although one more album was released (“Let it Be”), “Abbey Road” was the last album recorded by the band, which was already virtually dissolved as a unit. Yet the album was a great artistic and commercial success. The “Let it Be” album was intended to be released first, but the group did not think it ready. They moved on to record “Abbey Road” and released it on September 26th and October 1st, 1969, respectively, in the UK and the US. The cover photo, fittingly designed by Paul (as he was the only member who had a passion to keep the group together; even as he finally sued to end the partnership), depicts the band’s final crossing of “Abbey Road,” toward their studio home of the prior eight years. Ironically, even bizarrely, convicted murderer and “wall of sound” creator, Phil Specter, did the final mixing in 1970 of several songs on “Let it Be,” almost as an audition. He was not aware there would be no more Beatles, although he did some work for Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band. (more…)

This may be a shocking revelation to all but the most avid news-followers, but it is apparently true: pop star Michael Jackson recently passed away.  A handful of media outlets found time to cover the story, and some of them have mentioned Jackson’s feud with Paul McCartney over Jackson’s ownership of the publishing rights to some of the Beatles’ biggest hits-rights acquired when Jackson outbid Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono in the mid-1980’s. 

People not familiar with copyright law might be surprised to hear that McCartney-one-half of music’s most-successful songwriting duo-must pay royalties to perform his own hit songs.  The fact certainly seemed to grate on McCartney, who frequently made mention of it in interviews.  But even more surprising, at least to those not acquainted with the intricacies of copyright law, is that Sir Paul will one day be able to re-acquire the rights to his music without even having to pay to buy them back.

(more…)