Oscilloscope Laboratories announced this past week that All I Can Say, from the documentary filmmaking team of Danny Clinch, Taryn Gould and Colleen Hennessey will be available as both DVD and Blu-ray product offerings on Nov. 24.
There is one other member of the Clinch, Gould and Hennessey filmmaking team, and that was the subject of the film, Shannon Hoon, the lead singer for Blind Melon. He shot all of the film. Huh?
Documentary filmmaking is, by its very nature, a narrative. And a lot of rock-documentaries follow the pattern of vintage footage, interviews with former band member, friends of the subject, critics and so on. All I Can Say is unique in that Shannon Hoon started video himself in 1990, he chronicled tons of stuff in his life and did so for five solid years … and then he died of a cocaine overdose.
Danny Clinch has been making music videos, music-themed documentaries and assorted short films for years. He’s been nominated for Grammy Awards on three occasions, including in 2006 for the music video “Bruce Springsteen: Devils and Dust.” He knows the music business.
Back in 1992, when working for Spin Magazine, he did a photo shoot on Blind Melon, and got to know the lead singer, Shannon Hoon, they became friends. Skip ahead to 2018 and once again Clinch was revisiting his long-dead friend, only this time in the form of some 250 hours-worth of self-recorded videos, all filmed in a cinema verité fashion by Hoon, who seemed obsessed with sharing everything in his life and career.
WOW, what material. You watch the rise from a nobody to stardom … and then view the last video segment, which was recorded just hours before his death. Clinch teamed up with editor/producer Taryn Gold (who had the done the film editing for Clinch’s Pearl Jam: Let’s Play Two documentary in 2017) and camera technician Colleen Hennessey (she was one of camera operators on Clinch’s 2011 documentary, Dig It!) to go through the mountains of raw footage and assemble it into a coherent storyline.
It’s all Hoon, no talking heads, no former band members telling stories and the vintage footage is all Hoon. One clever thing that filmmaking team did, was to use old answering machine clips (Hoon kept those too) to provide context. All I Can Say is storytelling at its very, very best.
Bonus features include the video session titled “Camera as Consciousness,” which features producer/director Judd Apatow in conversation with Clinch, Gould and Hennessey, the featurette titled “A Conversation with Nico Hoon” (Shannon Hoon’s daughter) and the music video “In the End” performed by Nico Hoon.
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