Taking Woodstock

Taking Woodstock
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Ang Lee
Written by	James Schamus Based on the book by Elliot Tiber and Tom Monte
Produced by	Ang Lee James Schamus
Starring	Demetri Martin Imelda Staunton Henry Goodman Liev Schreiber Jonathan Groff Emile Hirsch Paul Dano
Cinematography	Eric Gautier
Edited by	Tim Squyres
Music by	Danny Elfman
Distributed by	Focus Features
Release date	August 28, 2009
Running time	120 min. extended dvd cut:149 min.
Country	Template:FilmUS
Language	English
Budget	$30 million
Box office	$13,773,925

Taking Woodstock is a Template:Fy American comedy-drama film about the Woodstock Festival of 1969 directed by Ang Lee. The screenplay by James Schamus is based on the memoir Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life by Elliot Tiber and Tom Monte. The film premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and opened in New York and Los Angeles on August 26, 2009 before its major theatrical release on August 28, 2009.

Plot

Set in 1969, the film follows the true story of Elliot Tiber, an aspiring Greenwich Village interior designer whose parents own the small dilapidated El Monaco Motel in White Lake, in the town of Bethel, New York. The hippie theater troupe The Earthlight Players rents the barn, but can hardly pay any rent. They sometimes run around naked outside, but are then chased back into the barn by Elliot's mother. Due to supposed financial trouble the motel may have to be closed, but Elliot assists in trying to avoid that.

Elliot plans to hold a small musical festival, and has, for one dollar, obtained a permit from the town of Bethel. When he hears that the organizers of the Woodstock Festival face opposition against the originally planned location, he offers his permit and the motel accommodations. Max Yasgur provides his nearby farm land; first they agree on a fee of $ 5,000, but after realizing how many people will come Yasgur demands $ 75,000, which the organizers reluctantly accept. Elliot comes to agreement about the fee for the motel more smoothly. Initial objections by his mother quickly disappear when she sees the cash paid in advance. A veteran transvestite is hired as security guard.

Elliot and Yasgur encounter a little bit of expected opposition. The local diner refuses to serve Elliot anymore, inspectors target the hotel (and only his) for building code violations, and some local boys paint a swastika and hate words on the hotel. However, these things are quickly squelched, and Yasgur doesn't care because he's gotten more politeness from everybody that came then he ever got from the locals who oppose it.

The Tiber family works hard and makes much money. Elliot and the viewer do not see the musical performances; on his way to them Elliot makes an LSD-trip with a couple, in their Volkswagen Bus.

When back Elliot suggests to his mother that they have now money to hire a worker, so that he can leave, but his greedy mother prefers Elliot's free services. However, it turns out that Elliot's mother secretly (without even her husband knowing) saved $ 97,000, so that even before the festival they were financially fine. Elliot hates it that his mother pretended financial trouble and requested him to help out. With his father's blessing he leaves to live his own life.

Production

Filming took place from August through October 2008 in New Lebanon, New York, located in Columbia County, and New York City.

Cast

• Demetri Martin as Elliot Tiber, who volunteered his family's motel to be the home base for Woodstock concert organizers which would take place on a nearby farm
• Imelda Staunton as Sonia Teichberg
• Henry Goodman as Jack Teichberg
• Liev Schreiber as Vilma, a transvestite
• Jonathan Groff as Woodstock organizer Michael Lang
• Emile Hirsch as Billy, a recently returned Vietnam vet
• Paul Dano and Kelli Garner as a hippie couple in a VW attending the concert
• Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Dan, Billy's brother and in opposition to the festival
• Eugene Levy as Max Yasgur, who owns the nearby farm
• Mamie Gummer as Lang's assistant
• Dan Fogler as a local theater troupe head
• Skylar Astin as John P. Roberts who bankrolled the Festival
• Damian Kulash as a guitar-playing hippie

Factual accuracy

Elliot Tiber is the author of the memoir on which the movie is based (Bologna, June 2009).

Michael Lang has disputed Tiber's account of the initial meeting with Max Yasgur, and said that he was introduced to Yasgur by a real estate salesman. Lang says that the salesman drove him, without Tiber, to Yasgur's farm. Sam Yasgur, son of Max Yasgur, agrees with Lang's version, and says that his mother, who is still alive, says Max did not know Tiber. Artie Kornfeld, a Woodstock organizer, has said he found out about Yasgur’s farm from his own sources.

Critical reaction

Rotten Tomatoes reported that 51% of critics gave the film positive reviews based on 144 reviews (Fresh:73, Rotten:71), with an average score of 5.6/10. Another review aggregator, Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 top reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 55%, based on 34 reviews.

Positive reviews

Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times wrote: "But Lee and writer James Schamus aren’t making a historical pastiche. This is a comedy with some sweet interludes and others that are cheerfully over the top, such as a nude theatrical troupe living in Elliot’s barn, and Vilma, his volunteer head of motel security, a transvestite ex-Marine played by Liev Schreiber. How does Schreiber, looking just as he usually does except for a blond wig and a dress, play a transvestite? Completely straight. It works."

Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune gave it 3 out 4 stars saying "Screenwriter James Schamus doesn’t do anything as stupid as shove Elliot back in the closet, but this is no “Brokeback Catskills Mountain.” It’s a mosaic—many characters, drifting in and out of focus—stitching the story of how the peace-and-music bash fell together as it bounced in the haphazard planning stages from its originally scheduled Wallkill, N.Y., location to a cow pasture in White Lake. (Eugene Levy, working hard to restrain his natural comic ebullience, plays the dairy farmer, Max Yasgur.)

Stephen Holden at the New York Times wrote, "Taking Woodstock pointedly shies away from spectacle, the better to focus on how the lives of individuals caught up by history are transformed...the movie explicitly connects Woodstock to the gay-liberation movement and the Stonewall riots, which took place two months earlier that summer.

Negative reviews

Lou Lumeneck at the New York Post gave it 1.5 stars. "It turns the fabled music festival, a key cultural moment of the late 20th century, into an exceedingly lame, heavily clichéd, thumb-sucking bore. There are two main problems with "Taking Woodstock." One is the central nonperformance by the stand-up comedian Demetri Martin, who is pretty much an emotional black hole as Elliot...the movie doesn't make much of an issue of the character's gayness -- which is utterly untrue to the period, 1969, even in enlightened circles."

Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice wrote, "Ang Lee’s facile Taking Woodstock proves that the decade is still prone to the laziest, wide-eyed oversimplifications...little music from the concert itself is heard. On display instead are inane, occasionally borderline offensive portrayals of Jews, performance artists, trannies, Vietnam vets, squares, and freaks.

Slate wrote, "After the long middle section building up to the actual Woodstock, the movie's treatment of the event is maddeningly indirect. No one's asking for a song-by-song re-enactment of the concert, but Lee's refusal to focus even for a moment on the musical aspect of the festival starts to feel almost perverse, as if he's deliberately frustrating the audience's desire."

Box office

Taking Woodstock grossed $3,457,760 for the opening weekend.

External links

• Official site
• Official Facebook Page
• Taking Woodstock at IMDb
• Taking Woodstock at AllMovie
• Taking Woodstock at Box Office Mojo
• Official trailer