home/movie/2016/eat that question frank zappa in his own words
Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
R
MusicDocumentary
7.4/10(23 ratings)
Utilizing potent TV interviews and many forgotten performances from his 30-year career, we are immersed into Frank Zappa’s world while experiencing two distinct facets of his complex character. At once Zappa was both a charismatic composer who reveled in the joy of performing and, in the next moment, a fiercely intelligent and brutally honest interviewee whose convictions only got stronger as his career ascended.
05-03-2016
1h 33m
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Main Cast
Movie Details
Production Info
Director:
Thorsten Schütte
Production:
Les Films du Poisson, UFA Fiction, SWR, ARTE
Key Crew
Producer:
Elizabeth Klinck
Executive Producer:
Gail Zappa
Associate Producer:
Nico Hofmann
Associate Producer:
Yaël Fogiel
Producer:
Estelle Fialon
Locations and Languages
Country:
US
Filming:
DE; FR
Languages:
en
Main Cast
Frank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, electronic, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. Zappa produced almost all of the more than 60 albums he released with the band The Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist.
While in his teens, he acquired a taste for percussion-based avant-garde composers such as Edgard Varèse and 1950s rhythm and blues music. He began writing classical music in high school, while at the same time playing drums in rhythm and blues bands; he later switched to electric guitar. He was a self-taught composer and performer, and his diverse musical influences led him to create music that was often impossible to categorize. His 1966 debut album with The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, combined songs in conventional rock and roll format with collective improvisations and studio-generated sound collages. His later albums shared this eclectic and experimental approach, irrespective of whether the fundamental format was one of rock, jazz or classical. He wrote the lyrics to all his songs, which—often humorously—reflected his iconoclastic view of established social and political processes, structures and movements. He was a strident critic of mainstream education and organized religion, and a forthright and passionate advocate for freedom of speech, self-education, political participation and the abolition of censorship.
Zappa was a highly productive and prolific artist and gained widespread critical acclaim. Many of his albums are considered essential in rock and jazz history. He is regarded as one of the most original guitarists and composers of his time. He also remains a major influence on musicians and composers. He had some commercial success, particularly in Europe, and for most of his career was able to work as an independent artist. Zappa was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997.
Zappa was married to Kathryn J. "Kay" Sherman from 1960 to 1964. In 1967, he married Adelaide Gail Sloatman, with whom he remained until his death from prostate cancer in 1993. They had four children: Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen. Gail Zappa manages the businesses of her late husband under the name the Zappa Family Trust.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Frank Zappa, licensed under CC-BY-SA,full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Theodore Meir Bikel wa a character actor, folk singer and musician. He made his film debut in The African Queen and was nominated for an Academy award for his supporting role as Sheriff Max Muller in The Defiant Ones.
Arlene Francis (born Arline Francis Kazanjian) was an American actress, radio talk show host, and game show panelist. She is known for her long-standing role as a panelist on the television game show What's My Line?, on which she regularly appeared for 25 years, from 1950 through the mid-1970s.
Keith John Moon (August 23, 1946 – 7 September 1978) was an English musician, best known for being the drummer of English rock group The Who. He gained acclaim for his exuberant and innovative drumming style, and notoriety for his eccentric and often self-destructive behaviour, earning him the nickname "Moon the Loon". Moon joined The Who in 1964. He played on all albums and singles from their debut, 1964's "Zoot Suit", to 1978's Who Are You, which was released three weeks before his death.
Moon was known for dramatic, suspenseful drumming—often eschewing basic back beats for a fluid, busy technique focused on fast, cascading rolls across the toms, ambidextrous double bass drum work and wild cymbal crashes and washes. He is mentioned in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of the greatest of all rock and roll drummers, and was posthumously inducted into the Rock Hall as a member of The Who in 1990.
Moon's legacy, as a member of The Who, as a solo artist, and as an eccentric personality, continues to garner awards and praise, including a Rolling Stone readers' pick placing him in second place of the magazine's "best drummers of all time" in 2011, nearly 35 years after his death.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Keith Moon, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen was an American television personality, radio personality, musician, composer, actor, comedian, writer, and advocate of scientific skepticism. In 1954, he achieved national fame as the co-creator and first host of The Tonight Show, which was the first late night television talk show.
Though he got his start in radio, Allen is best known for his extensive network television career. He gained national attention as a guest host on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. After he hosted The Tonight Show, he went on to host numerous game and variety shows, including his own The Steve Allen Show, I've Got a Secret, and The New Steve Allen Show. He was a regular panel member on CBS's What's My Line?, and from 1977 until 1981 wrote, produced, and hosted the award-winning public broadcasting show Meeting of Minds, a series of historical dramas presented in a talk format.
Allen was a pianist and a prolific composer. By his own estimate, he wrote more than 8,500 songs, some of which were recorded by numerous leading singers. Working as a lyricist, Allen won the 1964 Grammy Award for Best Original Jazz Composition. He also wrote more than 50 books, including novels, children's books, and books of opinions, including his final book, Vulgarians at the Gate: Trash TV and Raunch Radio.
In 1996 Allen was presented with the Martin Gardner Lifetime Achievement Award from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSICOP). He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Hollywood theater named in his honor.
James Carl Inkanish, Jr. (February 1, 1938 – November 1, 2008), known professionally as Jimmy Carl Black, was a drummer and vocalist for The Mothers of Invention.
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war contemporary classical music.
Born in Montbrison, in the Loire department of France, the son of an engineer, Boulez studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Olivier Messiaen, and privately with Andrée Vaurabourg and René Leibowitz. He began his professional career in the late 1940s as music director of the Renaud-Barrault theatre company in Paris. He was a leading figure in avant-garde music, playing an important role in the development of integral serialism in the 1950s, controlled chance music in the 1960s and the electronic transformation of instrumental music in real time from the 1970s onwards. His tendency to revise earlier compositions meant that his body of work was relatively small, but it included pieces considered landmarks of twentieth-century music, such as Le Marteau sans maître, Pli selon pli and Répons. His uncompromising commitment to modernism and the trenchant, polemical tone in which he expressed his views on music led some to criticise him as a dogmatist.
Boulez was also one of the most prominent conductors of his generation. In a career lasting more than sixty years, he was music director of the New York Philharmonic, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra. He made frequent appearances with many other orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic. He was known for his performances of the music of the first half of the twentieth century—including Debussy and Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartók, and the Second Viennese School—as well as that of his contemporaries, such as Ligeti, Berio and Carter. His work in the opera house included the production of Wagner's Ring cycle for the centenary of the Bayreuth Festival, and the world premiere of the three-act version of Berg's opera Lulu. His recorded legacy is extensive.
He also founded several musical institutions. In Paris he set up the Domaine musical in the 1950s to promote new music; in the 1970s he established the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique (IRCAM), to foster research and innovation in music, and the Ensemble intercontemporain, a chamber orchestra specialising in contemporary music. Later he co-founded the Cité de la musique, a concert hall, museum and library dedicated to music in the Parc de la Villette in Paris and, in Switzerland, the Lucerne Festival Academy, an international orchestra of young musicians, with which he gave first performances of many new works. ...
Source: Article "Pierre Boulez" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Katherine Anne Couric is an American television and online journalist, presenter, and author. From 2013 to 2017, she was Yahoo's Global News Anchor. Couric has been a television host on all Big Three television networks in the United States, and in her early career she was an Assignment Editor for CNN.
George Duke (January 12, 1946 – August 5, 2013) was an American keyboardist, composer, singer-songwriter, and record producer. Throughout his career he worked with musicians like Frank Zappa.
Václav Havel (5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and former dissident. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 31 December 1992 and then as the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays, and memoirs.
Adrian Belew (born Robert Steven Belew, December 23, 1949) is an American musician, songwriter and record producer. A multi-instrumentalist primarily known as a guitarist and singer, Belew is noted for his unusual, impressionistic approach to guitar playing which, rather than relying on standard instrumental tones, often resembles sound effects or noises made by animals and machines. A member of King Crimson and The Bears, Belew has also collaborated with David Bowie, Talking Head and many more.
Tom Brokaw is an American television journalist and author. He was the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News for 22 years (1982–2004). He is the only person to have hosted all three major NBC News programs: The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and, briefly, Meet the Press. He now serves as a special correspondent for NBC News and works on documentaries for other outlets
Vincent Peter Colaiuta is an American drummer who has worked as a session musician in many genres. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1996 and the Classic Drummer Hall of Fame in 2014.
June Lockhart (born June 25, 1925) is an American retired actress, beginning a film career in the 1930s and 1940s in such films as A Christmas Carol and Meet Me in St. Louis. She primarily acted in 1950s and 1960s television, and with performances on stage and in film. On two television series, Lassie and Lost in Space, she played mother roles. She also portrayed Dr. Janet Craig on the CBS television sitcom Petticoat Junction (1968–70). She is a two-time Emmy Award nominee and a Tony Award winner. With a career spanning nearly 90 years, she is one of the last surviving actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Her father was veteran actor Gene Lockhart.
Description above from the Wikipedia article June Lockhart , licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Keith John Moon (August 23, 1946 – 7 September 1978) was an English musician, best known for being the drummer of English rock group The Who. He gained acclaim for his exuberant and innovative drumming style, and notoriety for his eccentric and often self-destructive behaviour, earning him the nickname "Moon the Loon". Moon joined The Who in 1964. He played on all albums and singles from their debut, 1964's "Zoot Suit", to 1978's Who Are You, which was released three weeks before his death.
Moon was known for dramatic, suspenseful drumming—often eschewing basic back beats for a fluid, busy technique focused on fast, cascading rolls across the toms, ambidextrous double bass drum work and wild cymbal crashes and washes. He is mentioned in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of the greatest of all rock and roll drummers, and was posthumously inducted into the Rock Hall as a member of The Who in 1990.
Moon's legacy, as a member of The Who, as a solo artist, and as an eccentric personality, continues to garner awards and praise, including a Rolling Stone readers' pick placing him in second place of the magazine's "best drummers of all time" in 2011, nearly 35 years after his death.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Keith Moon, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
Jean-Luc Ponty (born 29 September 1942) is a French jazz violinist and composer.
Ponty was born into a family of classical musicians in Avranches, France. His father taught violin, his mother taught piano. At sixteen, he was admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, graduating two years later with the institution's highest honor, Premier Prix (first prize). He was hired by the Concerts Lamoureux in which he played for three years.
While still a member of the orchestra in Paris, Ponty picked up a side job playing clarinet (which his father had taught him) for a college jazz band, that regularly performed at local parties. It proved life-changing. A growing interest in Miles Davis and John Coltrane compelled him to take up tenor saxophone. One night after an orchestra concert, and still wearing his tuxedo, Ponty found himself at a local club with only his violin. Within four years, he was widely accepted as the leading figure in "jazz fiddle".
At that time, Ponty was leading a dual musical life: rehearsing and performing with the orchestra while also playing jazz at clubs throughout Paris. The demands of this schedule eventually brought him to a crossroads. Critic Joachim Berendt wrote that "Since Ponty, the jazz violin has been a different instrument".
At first, the violin proved to be challenging; few at the time viewed the instrument as having a legitimate place in the modern jazz vocabulary. With a powerful sound that eschewed vibrato, Ponty distinguished himself with bebop phrasing and a punchy style influenced more by horn players than by anything previously tried on the violin. In 1964, at age 22, he released his debut album, Jazz Long Playing. He performed on stage in Basel, Switzerland, with string players Stuff Smith, Stéphane Grappelli, and Svend Asmussen. The performance was released as the album Violin Summit (1966).
John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet invited Ponty to perform at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1967, which led to a recording contract with the World Pacific label and the albums Electric Connection (1969) with the Gerald Wilson Big Band and Jean-Luc Ponty Experience with the George Duke Trio (1969). That year also brought Sunday Walk (1967), the first collaboration between Ponty and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen.
In 1969, Frank Zappa composed the music for Ponty's solo album King Kong: Jean-Luc Ponty Plays the Music of Frank Zappa (World Pacific, 1970). In 1972, Elton John invited Ponty to contribute to his Honky Chateau (1972) album. At the urging of Zappa and The Mothers of Invention who wanted him to join their tour, Ponty emigrated with his wife and two young daughters to the United States and made his home in Los Angeles. He continued to work on a variety of projects – including two of John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra albums Apocalypse (1974) and Visions of the Emerald Beyond (1975) and tours until 1975, when he signed with Atlantic. ...
Source: Article "Jean-Luc Ponty" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Milton Supman, known professionally as Soupy Sales, was an American comedian, actor, radio/television personality, and jazz aficionado. He was best known for his local and network children's television show Lunch with Soupy Sales, a series of comedy sketches frequently ending with Sales receiving a pie in the face, which became his trademark. From 1968 to 1975 he was a regular panelist on the syndicated revival of What's My Line? and appeared on several other TV game shows. During the 1980s, Sales hosted his own show on WNBC-AM in New York City.
Sales is best known for his daily children's television show, Lunch with Soupy Sales. The show was originally called 12 O'Clock Comics, and was later known as The Soupy Sales Show. Improvised and slapstick in nature, Lunch with Soupy Sales was a rapid-fire stream of comedy sketches, gags, and puns, almost all of which resulted in Sales receiving a pie in the face, which became his trademark. Sales developed pie-throwing into an art form: straight to the face, on top of the head, a pie to both ears from behind, moving into a stationary pie, and countless other variations. He claimed that he and his visitors had been hit by more than 20,000 pies during his career. He recounted a time when a young fan mistakenly threw a frozen pie at his neck and he "dropped like a pile of bricks."
Richard Starkey, MBE (born 7 July 1940), better known by his stage name Ringo Starr, is an English musician, singer-songwriter, and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for The Beatles. When the band formed in 1960, Starr was a member of another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He became The Beatles' drummer in August 1962, taking the place of Pete Best. In addition to his contribution as drummer, Starr featured as lead vocals on a number of successful Beatles songs (in particular, "With a Little Help from My Friends", "Yellow Submarine", and The Beatles version of "Act Naturally"), as co-writer with the song "What Goes On" and primary writer with "Don't Pass Me By" and "Octopus's Garden".
As drummer for The Beatles, Starr was musically creative, and his contribution to the band's music has received high praise from notable drummers in more recent times. Starr described himself as "your basic offbeat drummer with funny fills", technically limited by being a left-handed person playing a right-handed kit. Drummer Steve Smith said that Starr's popularity "brought forth a new paradigm" where "we started to see the drummer as an equal participant in the compositional aspect" and that Starr "composed unique, stylistic drum parts for The Beatles songs". In 2011, Starr was picked as the fifth-best drummer of all-time by Rolling Stone readers, behind drummers such as John Bonham, Keith Moon and Neil Peart.
Starr is the most documented and critically acclaimed actor-Beatle, playing a central role in several Beatles films, and appearing in numerous other movies, both during and after his career with The Beatles. After The Beatles' break-up in 1970, Starr achieved solo musical success with several singles and albums, and recorded with each of his fellow ex-Beatles as they too developed their post-Beatle musical careers. He has also been featured in a number of TV documentaries, hosted TV shows, and narrated the first two series of the children's television series Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends. He currently tours with the All-Starr Band.
Chester Cortez Thompson is an American musician. He is primarily a drummer, percussionist, session musician, producer, and teacher. Thompson is perhaps best known for working with Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention from 1973 to 1975, and with the progressive rock band Genesis from 1977 to 1992, and again in 2007. He is a current member of his jazz group, the Chester Thompson Trio, formed in 2011.
Allan Zavod was born on October 16, 1945 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. He was a composer, known for The Time Guardian (1987), Martians Go Home (1989) and Communion (1989). He was married to Christine. He died on November 29, 2016 in Melbourne, Australia.
