State of the Art

Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker

by Jon Garelick

Watching the new documentary Moon over Broadway, you'd wonder what kind of people would agree to let someone follow them around to film their daily activities. In this case, the subject is the team putting together the Broadway-bound comedy Moon over Buffalo, starring Carol Burnett and Philip Bosco. As opening night approaches and the play goes through five weeks of previews in Boston, playwright Ken Ludwig rewrites furiously, tempers flare, the bad reviews come in, and filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker are there to catch every excruciating minute of it. Think about it: would you want Hegedus and Pennebaker filming meetings between you and your boss?

"I wouldn't," Chris Hegedus assents. In fact, she says, it's often difficult for her and Pennebaker (with whom she's been working since 1976; they married in 1982) to persuade people to participate. "For The War Room [their 1993 film about the Clinton campaign] we never did get what we wanted -- which was to follow the candidate freely. But then you look around at what you have to work with and there's James Carville." The film made Carville a star and received an Academy Award nomination.

Hegedus and Pennebaker had reason to expect nothing but smooth sailing for Moon over Buffalo. Ludwig had scored a huge hit with his earlier farce, Lend Me a Tenor. Bosco had worked with him on that production, and they had the added star power of Burnett. "At the first reading," says Pennebaker, "I had no reason to expect anything other than a huge hit. I was laughing so hard I could hardly hold the camera steady." But then the rewrites begin. The team realize that their star doesn't have enough to do. Moon becomes a vehicle for Burnett, new material invented not only to get more laughs in act one but to incorporate the shtick that Burnett throws in from one rehearsal to the next.

So how did the Moon crew react to the film? "I think it was very painful for a lot of them to relive it," says Hegedus. "There were a lot of conflicts going on, and we're revealing them again for everyone to see in our film. And that's hard."

"I think they recognized the completeness of what we had done," qualifies Pennebaker, "and that it was a good kind of tale of what they all knew had happened. There were no anomalies that we had invented or things we'd taken out of circumstance in order to make a more shocking or arresting scene. So I think they kind of all bought it, even if they had some personal embarrassments about it."

Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker will introduce Moon over Broadway and Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, about Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of England, at the Coolidge Corner this Friday, March 20. Call 734-2500. For reviews of both films, see "Trailers."