Film Info
Paul Williams Still Alive

Film Information

Exhibition Title	Paul Williams Still Alive
Director	Stephen Kessler
Country
Year	2011
Format	DM
Colour	Color
Duration	87'

Cast:

Paul Williams, Stephen Kessler

Credits:

G: Stephen Kessler
F: Vern Nobles
E: David Zieff
DA: Perry Andeline Blake
S: Marcos Contreras
P: Jim Czarnecki, Stephen Kessler, Mike Wilkins, David Zieff
PE: Lesa Lakin Richardson, Rob Cohen
CP: 3W Films

dates & times ticket

tickets

Synopsis

A title can say a lot, but in the case of this documentary, it says it all. The film opens with Kessler believing Paul Williams to be dead. If that’s not a great way to start a film about Paul Williams, I don’t know what is. For those unfamiliar with him, Paul Williams is the man who wrote the soundtrack to the 1970s. His range of work varied from A Star is Born to the beloved-by-many Phantom of the Paradise to the original Muppet Movie –and that’s not even scraping the surface. Kermit the Frog’s classic “The Rainbow Connection”, The Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays” –those were Paul Williams, too, along with about fifty other 1970s anthems. So how could so iconic a figure be so unremembered, even though his fingerprints are all over a decade of American musical history? That’s one of the questions that Kessler sets out to answer in his film. And this is as much a story about Williams’ relationship with Kessler as it is about Williams. That’s what makes the film so endearing –it captures that strange relationship between film subject and filmmaker, something that is carefully hidden in most documentaries. CG