Taking Stock of Who We Were: Ang Lee’s new movie “Taking Woodstock” has backstory of pure serendipity

October 11, 2008

By Dan Bloom

WOODSTOCK,NY(RUSHPRNEWS)10/11/08– As previously reported by RushPRnews, Fiftysomething director Ang Lee is tackling a new movie project, a comedy this time, and his third film with a gay storyline, about the Woodstock Nation hippie music festival in August of 1969. Remember those days? Were you there? Too young to remember? Read on. The movie will be released late June, just around the time of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock Nation’s coming out party.

The movie’s title is “Taking Woodstock” — and more later in this piece about what the title means and how a savvy PR guy came up with it last year — and the film’s screenplay was written by longtime Lee collaborator James Schamus. The genesis? A quietly-published memoir by New York writer Elliot Tiber, who was there, front and center, at Woodstock, when “it happened”. One of the central players.

Schamus, who received the Honorary Trailblazer award at the recently-concluded Woodstock Film Festival in upstate New York, is almost at the 50 mark himself, Lee’s junior by a few years. Lee presented the award to Schamus in person at the award ceremony last week. Lee’s presentation was one of many at the awards ceremony, which was held at Backstage Studio Productions in Kingston and attended by some 500 people, according to industry sources.

Kyle Wind, writing in for the Daily Freeman in New York, reported that Lee, in presenting the award to Schamus, said he believes “a trailblazer is someone who hacks away bushes in the way to go somewhere he’s curious about.”

And then the avuncular, soft-spoken Lee, a U.S. resident for over 20 years, said, according to a video now online: “That’s what filmmaking is about — it’s about the unknown. Every time I do it, it’s like the first time. I’m like Madonna — ‘Like a Virgin.’”

According to Schamus, most of the exterior shooting on “Taking Woodstock” has been completed now, “thus avoiding fall foliage nightmares.”

When a local upstate New York reporter asked him why the production didn’t shoot in Sullivan County, the book’s actual setting, Schamus replied: “We scouted all over New York and Ang found the perfect motel that could stand in for the original (which has since burned down) in New Lebanon.
That’s showbiz for you.”

Now, back to this movie’s amazing backstory. This has never been reported before and is in that sense a scoop. A Hollywood scoop, a Publishers Row scoop.

Elliot Tiber’s memoir “Taking Woodstock” was quietly published with little fanfare in 2007 by a small but savvy publisher on Long Island and subtitled “A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life.” The book has now become Ang Lee’s entree into the world of film comedy.

Although the release date is not set in concrete yet, given the times we live in, it is tentatively set for a premiere in New York on June 26, 2009 — according to sources and several movie websites on the Internet.

The three-day Woodstock concert actually took place in the middle of August of that year, beginning on August 15.

Rudy Shur is the president of Square One Publishers, a book company in New York, which bought the book and released it in 2007 without really knowing if there was a Hollywood movie in it. But ten months after publication, a movie deal was signed with Focus Features in New York. Focus Features is owned by NBC Universal, with Schamus serving as the independent studio’s CEO.

Tongues are already wagging on blogs and websites about what the Taiwan-born Lee’s take on the Woodstock era will be like. At the time, 1969, Lee — now 53 — was still living in Taipei, a student, dreaming of a life in the arts, maybe as an actor, maybe as a writer.

In a recent email interview with RushPRnews about how the book and movie sale came about, publisher Shur, 62, explained the book’s serendipitous backstory.

“Two friends of mine told me about a man they knew who had a very interesting and unique ’story’ to tell, and they asked me to call him and see for myself if the memoir project — still unwritten — would make a good book,” Shur told RushPRnews. “After talking to Elliot Tiber — who is 72 now — and listening to his story about Woodstock in the Sixties, I told him that it would make a terrific book, but that our book company usually didn’t publish those types of memoirs and that he would be better off with a larger publishing house that had more experience and marketing clout.”
Despite Shur’s advice to take his book project to a bigger publishing company, Tiber kept coming back to him and Shur finally said that he would take on the book, but with the same earlier reservations he had expressed before.

“I decided that maybe it was time to take a chance with this kind of book, and since it was my company, well, I would do as good a job as I could,” Shur added. “So I called Elliot up and said ‘Lets go for it’.”

The book’s genesis was complicated. “The story he wanted to tell was basically all Elliot, but to tell it in a manner that presented a balanced story in the way that I was looking for meant calling in a co-writer, Tom Monte,” Shur said.

“Elliot’s normal writing style was very creative and stream-of-consciousness, but I wanted more of a traditional story narrative. I had worked with Monte before, so I signed him to put Elliot’s material into the style I was looking for.

Joanne Abrams, my senior editor, worked with Elliot to get his memoir into a more finalized form, and Monte did his magic with the book, too. When it was done, Elliot approved, and we had our book.”

The title of the book, and now Lee’s movie, also has an interesting backstory, and this has never been disclosed publicly before. You read it here first.

Shur explained that the title was the brainchild of Square One’s marketing director, Anthony Pomes.

“We had lots of titles in mind, but ‘Taking Woodstock’ seemed to fit best based on the story,” Shur noted. “We felt the title meant two things: Taking stock of your life and, in a sense, control of your destiny — and also taking the experience of Woodstock, and what that cultural event meant, with you for the rest of your life.”

“Woodstock was a moment of freedom as well as a coming of age for a new generation in America,” Shur added. “So we used that title for the book, and Lee and Schamus are using it for the movie as well. We are delighted.”

“The book’s narrative reflects a young Elliot Tiber in his 20s who was on the brink of financial ruin at the time but who was also in a position to help pull off one of our generation’s greatest rock concerts,” Shur said. “I wanted to include some of the most important, yet overlooked, facts of the coming together of the concert, and Monte (Eliot’s co-writer), having also lived through the period, was able to do just that.”

When the book was first released, there were only a few reviews since Square One was not a large publisher and did not have the same kind of marketing clout as the larger book companies in New York. But the reviews were nevertheless positive, and slowly, word of mouth began to spread on the Internet at book websites and blogs.

“We could see a real ‘grass-roots’ interest starting to build around the book,” Pomes, the marketing director, said. “The audience was growing week by week, and we felt we held a sleeper title that had what it took to turn into a winner.”

How the book morphed into a soon-to-be-released Hollywood movie directed by Academy Award winner Ang Lee is also a story that Shur tells with relish.

“It will sound like a Hollywood myth, but it really happened this way,” he said. “Tiber was scheduled to appear on a West Coast television show to promote the book, and while he was waiting in the green room to go on the show, who should sit down next to him, by pure chance, but Ang Lee!”
It turns out that Lee was also scheduled to appear on that same interview show to promote his latest film, “Lust, Caution”.

“Elliot,” continues Shur, “introduced himself and spent the next hour chatting with him about his book.”

“Well, when Lee went on the show, the host finished the interview by asking Lee where he usually got his ideas from for his movies, and Lee said that he really doesn’t go looking for stories, that they seem to come to him,” Shur added. “And with that, he turned to Elliot, who was sitting across from him, and gave him a sly wink.”

“Nothing really happened until about five months later, when Lee had finally read the book,” Shur said. “Lee and Schamus felt there was a movie here, and together they went to upstate New York to visit the Yasgur’s Farm site where the Woodstock festival took place. Elliot joined them there at the site, and the project was in the can. The agents finalized the deal, everything was signed, and here we are. It looks like Lee was right: in this case, the next movie project really did just seem to come to him.”

When asked if he knew there was a movie in the book from the very beginning, Shur told this reporter: “I’ll be honest with you.As we worked on the book, I knew that Elliot’s story had the potential to make a great independent movie. It was like no other Woodstock story ever published. I believed that we could find a small independent producer who could turn the book into a film. However, in my wildest dreams I would have never thought it to be the likes of Ang Lee and James Schamus, two Academy Award winners who would take on the project. So far, it’s been an amazing ride.”

So get ready for Ang Lee’s new movie set for release in the summer of 2009, although the release date as stated above is not set in concrete and may change according to the whims of Hollywood’s scheduling mavens.

In the meantime, readers who want to get straight to the heart of this unique American memoir can grab hold of Tiber’s book, available in bookstores and on Internet ordering sites worldwide.

No doubt, however, Lee will have plenty to say himself about how Tiber’s book came to him, and how he and Schamus collaborated on it as a film comedy. For now, though, Rudy Shur has told the story his way.

read previous RushPRnews Ang Lee stories
———–

About the author: Dan Bloom is a RushPRnews political and environmental news columnist/reporter and a freelance writer from Boston, who has been based in Asia since 1991. He graduated from Tufts University in 1971 and has worked in media, public relations and education in several countries. He is currently doing research on climate change and global warming as the founder of the Polar Cities Research Institute. Write him at danbloom@RushPRnews.com

Filed Under: Awards, ENTERTAINMENT, FILM, PRESS RELEASE

RUSH PR NEWS newswire and press release services at rushprnews.com / Anne Howard annehowardpublicist.com

Content- Legal Responsability - All material is copyrighted - You may repost but you MUST link back to the original post on your page and acknowledge Rush PR News as the news source. Rush PR News is not legally and/or morally responsible for content of press releases, opinions expressed or fact-checking.

Rush PR News cannot be held legally responsible for material published and distributed through its newswire service or published in its press-room and therefore cannot be sued for published material. Third-party must be contacted directly to dispute content.

Rush PR News is not the contact for material published.