You've seen the work of my pal Lee Aronsohn on a number of successful TV shows including Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory. A while back over lunch, he told me about a new project he had — a documentary of a musical group he followed in the early seventies. You never heard of the band because they never made it, never even had an album. But they were popular at and around his alma mater — the University of Colorado in Boulder. They were called Magic Music.
Haunted by their music for decades after and curious about whatever happened to them, Lee set out to track 'em down, find out and maybe even get the band together again. The result is a documentary called 40 Years in the Making: The Magic Music Movie and it's won many, many awards in film festivals. It's opening this weekend in New York and the following weekend in Los Angeles and so on and so on in other cities.
Lee gave me a preview and I really liked it…a lot. A story about a group that hit the big time would not be without interest but this tale of a band that never quite went the distance is somehow more intriguing. I'm about the same age as Lee and like him, grew up in the turmoil of the sixties and Vietnam and Nixon and a lot of fumbling-about to find one's values and to reconcile them with finding a place in the world. Every one of my friends had to weigh living for the present against living for the future and we often struggled with being what your heart told you you should be versus your brain telling you what you could be.
So the film's about all that and it's also about Lee trying to reunite the guys and get their story told…and I guess also to make sure their unreleased tracks finally, a half century later, got released. If any of this sounds even vaguely interesting to you, check it out. You can find out where it's opening near you and learn more about it on this page. You can also watch the trailer there or — to save you a click — you can watch it below…