Pavements

An examination of the iconic 1990s indie band Pavement appears to be just another music documentary—until it isn’t. A prismatic hybrid of narrative, scripted, documentary, musical, and metatextual forms, the film intimately shows the band preparing for their sold-out 2022 reunion tour while simultaneously tracking the preparations for a musical based on their songs, a museum devoted to their history, and a big-budget Hollywood biopic inspired by their saga as the most important band of a generation.

The music documentary has run out of gas. The musician biopic seems doomed to be a part of our lives forever, the lowest form of highbrow storytelling. Yet, against my better judgement, I love all of these movies that are rarely very good and seldom qualify as cinema. I love-to-hate clichéd storytelling in phoney baloney biopics. I will watch any archival documentary that invites me to revel in the aesthetics of a bygone era that I miss dearly. With Pavements, I wanted to explore my dubious passion for all of this and make a film in a directing style free from the pressure of “the shot” or “the take.” My goal was to not direct scenes or shots but to shape entire experiences and allow them to be documented naturally— such as the opening of a museum or the opening night of a musical—creating storytelling that unfolds in public yet is all done for a film. Only the nonsense biopic scenes would be filmed “normally”; true to that genre, the images are unremarkable, and the coverage is endlessly traditional. Pavements is four or five films rolled into one because I wish that all musical biopics and standard-issue documentaries were 30 minutes long. I’d watch more of them that way. There has never been a band like Pavement, and I hope there has never been a film like Pavements. It both is and is not. It presupposes that an iconic band deserves all the cultural victories typically afforded to much more financially successful artists. But what I learned while making the museum and the musical, and thus the film, is that Pavement deserve these tributes. It is time to ask questions about how stories about musicians are told and sold and for us as the audience to demand more innovation in our biographical portraits.

PRODUCTION 1: ALLDAYEVERYDAY
http://www.alldayeveryday.com
@allday

PRODUCTION 2: PULSE FILMS
https://www.pulsefilms.com
@pulsefilms

PRODUCTION 3: MATADOR RECORDS
https://matadorrecords.com
@matadorrecords

PRODUCTION 4: FIELD RECORDINGS
https://lancebangs.com
@lancebangs

PRODUCTION 5: WW7 ENTERTAINMENT
https://ww7.tv
@worldwarseven

PRODUCTION 6: HIPGNOSIS
https://www.hipgnosissongs.com
@hipgnosissongs

WORLD SALES: Utopia
sales@utopiadistribution.com

PRESS OFFICE: Ryan Werner & Emilie Spiegel – Cinetic Media
26 Broadway, 14th Floor, New York, NY 10004
Tel. (212) 204-7979
emilie@cineticmedia.com
https://cineticmedia.com