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Rush is a Band

A blog devoted to RUSH:
Neil Peart, Geddy Lee & Alex Lifeson

Fri, Nov 22, 2024

Rush: The Documentary sneak peek shown at Windsor film festival

Mon, Nov 16, 2009@10:12AM | comments removed/disabled

UPDATE - 11/17@9:16AM: I have a couple of quick updates. I'm pretty certain now that the portion of the clip with Alex talking to his parents was taken from the 1973 Allan King documentary Come On Children which Alex was involved with. The way it's described sounds exactly like one scene from the film and reader RushFanForever confirmed with Martin Popoff (who is also involved with the Rush documentary) that they did indeed use several clips from that film. Also, RushFanForever located this short audio interview with Dunn and McFadyen from the Windsor Film Festival where they mention that one of the chapters in the Rush documentary is titled Revenge of the Nerds.

We had last heard an update regarding the upcoming Rush Documentary this past summer when filmmakers Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen were interviewed by Classic Rock's Jerry Ewing for Prog magazine. In the interview we received a few more details regarding the documentary including the fact that it wouldn't likely be released until next Summer. Shortly after that they posted a few behind-the-scenes pics to the Banger Films website, but we hadn't heard much of anything since then. This past weekend Scot and Sam appeared at an event titled Take Five! The Return of Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn as part of the Windsor International Film Festival at the Capitol Theatre & Arts Centre in Windsor, ON. They spoke about and showed clips from all of the documentaries they've worked on and saved the last 5 minutes for a sneak peek look at the Rush documentary. They titled the sneak peek clip Rush - The Early Years and reader spiralarray was lucky enough to attend and reported the following:

... They said no one (other than them and Rush and some insiders I guess) had seen the footage. In the clip , there was footage of Geddy (current) and Geddy's mother (talking about Geddy when he was younger and how worried she was when he quit school,etc). Also, some footage of Alex (high school age) sitting at a table with his parents, talking about his future and that he wanted to quit school. His parents were trying to convince him to go to university. There was also footage from a show Rush did at a high school, with John Rustey on drums. Pretty neat. I asked them when they expect to be finished and when it will be released and I didn't get a firm answer, but they said they are still working on it and The Toronto Film festival was mentioned, for a premiere of the documentary. They said possibly January, but it sounded like next year sometime, is when it will be out on DVD. They want to get some footage for at the end of the documentary of Rush in the studio working on their next album, I think, before they finish it off. Just thought I'd share that with you guys. It was pretty cool to see these 2 guys and be able to interact with them a bit. They are are cool guys and you could tell they respect Rush a lot. ...

So it definitely sounds like they have some great home movies from the guys to share in the documentary and - more surprisingly - some early footage of the band with John Rutsey. This seems to confirm something I'd already heard on very good authority; that the filmmakers had gotten their hands on some pro-shot footage taken from a Canadian Bandstand gig the band played at Laura Secord High School in St. Catharines, ON in 1974 (no joke!). If this is true (and I can't think of any other high school gig pre-Peart that they would have quality footage of), it is a pretty big deal since there has never been any publicly released footage of the band playing with Rutsey on drums. As for the release date for the film, that still sounds dependent on many factors including what comes out of Rush's band meeting this month. The filmmakers seem to really want to include some footage of the guys in the studio; hopefully Rush will oblige them. It would be nice if Scot and Sam would post this preview somewhere online so we can all see it! (hint, hint)