Joe Lauro Heads to Venice and HIFF With His Newport Folk Fest Film

“Well, there’s times when words have got to cease and music take over. I think maybe that’s right now.” — Pete Seeger, musician

Earlier this summer, Joe Lauro invited a group of friends to Sag Harbor Cinema for a private screening of his latest film project. Titled “Newport & The Great Folk Dream,” the feature-length documentary is constructed entirely from rare and previously unseen archival footage that was shot at the Newport Folk Festival between the years 1963 and 1966.

Produced by Lauro and directed by Robert Gordon, among the performers featured in “Newport & The Great Folk Dream” are Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, Judy Collins, Pete Seeger, Bessie Jones and many others with less well-known names. The film captures a key time in history when the world was changing drastically and tradition was challenged on several fronts — socially, politically and of course, musically.

One of the people Lauro invited to the film screening was Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, the artistic director of Sag Harbor Cinema.

“Giulia said, ‘Can you send me a screener? I’m in Italy,’” Lauro recalled. He did, and shortly thereafter he received a call back. “She said, ‘This is a beautiful film. Would you be able to show it in Venice?’”

Venice, of course, means La Biennale Cinema di Venezia, or in other words, the Venice International Film Festival, which was held in late August. D’Agnolo Vallan had good reason for asking as she is the festival’s U.S. programmer as well as a member of its international selection committee.

“I said it would be a world premiere, and she said that’s what they wanted,” added Lauro who traveled to Venice for the screening along with Gordon, co-producer Kim Bledsoe Lloyd and editor/producer Laura Jean Hocking. There, “Newport & The Great Folk Dream” not only received a standing ovation, it was also voted #12 out of 150 films screened.

“We beat out ‘Frankenstein,’” Lauro noted with a grin. “We did well there. You work on these things in a void. Suddenly you’re surrounded by the glitz and all this activity.”

That activity continues this week with the Hamptons International Film Festival and the North American premiere of “Newport & The Great Folk Dream” on Friday, October 3, at East Hampton UA Cinema. A second screening follows where it all began — Sag Harbor Cinema — on Saturday, October 4.

The history of the Newport Folk Festival can be traced to jazz promoter George Wein, a piano player who owned a Boston club called Storyville. It was Wein who organized the first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954. But within a few years, he was fielding requests to present people like Odetta, a singer closely associated with the civil rights movement, whose repertoire included folk and spirituals. The first two Newport Folk Festivals were held in 1959 and 1960, but then the festival stopped for two years.

“We pick it up in ‘63 when it was reborn, thanks to Pete Seeger,” Lauro said.

The story behind this film follows a familiar pattern for Lauro, a Sag Harbor resident and musician who, as founder and CEO of Greenport-based Historic Films Archives, has a knack for tracking down forgotten or obscure video and film footage — particularly of musical performances.

In this case, Lauro knew that the footage of the Newport Folk Festival from 1963 to 1966 existed, he just had a lot of work to do to procure it from the owner, Murray Lerner. Lerner was a documentary and experimental film director and producer. In 1963, Pete Seeger and the other organizers of the Newport Folk Festival realized something special was happening and wanted it documented. So, Seeger’s wife Toshi and George Pickow, a photographer and filmmaker who chronicled the folk and jazz scenes, grabbed cameras and began shooting.

“By ‘64, they thought maybe this is a television special and upped their game,” Lauro explained. “In ‘65 and ’66, the idea hadn’t coalesced, but Murray knew he would make a film, which culminated in ‘67 with his documentary ‘Festival.’”

Lauro explained that since Lerner’s film was less than two hours long, that meant there were hundreds more hours of footage from those four festivals that no one had ever seen.

“We used the rest of it,” Lauro said. “Very little of it had met the light of day. He guarded it like his children. He was a Harvard grad, a smart fellow and very few people got to see it. I worked on him for seven years starting in 2005.

“I’d say, ‘Murray, why don’t we do something with this footage?’ He’d say, ‘You get me the money.’ This went on for a number of years, Murray was getting older,” Lauro said. “The year before he died, he said, ‘Yeah, let’s talk.’

“We bought the library with the idea I’d make this film,” Lauro said, though he soon realized that given his day job, the amount of work required would be massive so he asked Robert Gordon to come on as director. “We negotiated with the Newport Festivals Foundation and when I had a green light, we got to work. That was seven years ago. The first four was arranging everything. We were in production for the next three years.

“It’s a wealth of riches. This is the ‘Summer of Soul’ for folk music,” he continued. “Most everything we liked wound up in the film, but the real theme is that change is inevitable. It’s one of the big conflicts in the film.”

Lauro notes that this documentary was in process long before anyone knew the film “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan performing electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, would hit theaters in 2024. Lauro is pleased that Chalamet’s presence in the film introduced younger audiences to folk music, just as performers like Dylan and Joan Baez introduced their young fans to the more traditional style of folk music in Newport back in the 1960s.

“Dylan was the crown prince. Pete Seeger, George Wein and the rest of them were very clever,” Lauro said. “They knew that all the kids knew Peter, Paul and Mary, Bobby Dylan, Judy Collins. So, what do they do between these acts? They have people like Mississippi John Hurt. It was an eye opener. All these college kids who had that record thought those guys were dead. But here they were.

“George Wein, to me, is one of the great visionaries of the music world,” Lauro continued. “His ego wasn’t such that he controlled everything. He listened. Workshops, that’s George Wein. Not only were they listening to performances, but they were trying to teach people how the music is played. A lot of young kids, including Loudon Wainwright, brought their guitars to Newport. They’d sit at the feet of Mississippi John Hurt and watch his fingers. They saw how it’s done, how it works. This is a banjo in a coal miner key. All this stuff that came out in workshops wasn’t them vs. us. In the early years, the audience and musicians were one. It was accessible.”

It was also a throwback to how things were done in the old days when young musicians learned their craft from the older guy down the block. In other words — everything was regional.

“The Piedmont style of guitar playing, the Cajun way of playing, then down in the Delta where guys were slapping the strings — all the guys from there played that way,” Lauro said. “Regional style dies when technology brings music everywhere. You’re hearing a lot of undiluted styles in this film.

“Another thing I love as a musician. You go to a concert now and there’s a soundman, 38 mics on a drum. Back then, there was just one mic and everyone gathered around it. The person singing lead moves up, or if they’re playing a solo, leans in.”

Though the music takes center stage, the story of “Newport & The Great Folk Dream” is also one of a fracturing scene behind the curtain due to the divergent personalities of the organizers. They were talent manager Albert Grossman, whose client list included Dylan; Alan Lomax, an ethnomusicologist and uncompromising purist when it came to preserving and recording traditional folk music; and Seeger, who just wanted the factions to harmonize, both literally and musically.

Their conflicting visions came to loggerheads at Newport.

“Grossman put Peter, Paul and Mary together. He was the devil to a lot of people. He didn’t care about the traditions. It was more about the financial success of groups,” Lauro explained. “Seeger’s take was, ‘Everyone should sing together,’ but Alan Lomax wanted to keep it pure.

“They didn’t get along and there were knock down drag out arguments,” Lauro continued. “Who should go on first? Are they authentic? In ‘63 and ‘64, it was musical utopia. Everyone got paid $50 and wanted to be there. It was intimate and they wanted to share. But once the Beatles arrived in the U.S. everything changed. Dylan was an artist and wanted to push it forward. As Dylan said, ‘the times they are a-changin’.’”

Though popular lore points to Dylan as being the catalyst who changed Newport Folk Festival forever by going electric, Lauro notes that he wasn’t the first. Paul Butterfield and other acts had already “plugged in,” so to speak, though not always quite as dramatically as Dylan did when he made the decision to do the same.

“It meant so much to folkies. Him plugging in was a game changer and sad for the traditionalists,” Lauro said. “The movie is the struggle of that change. In my humble opinion the greatest thing about it is the music — African Americans, Irish, Italians coming together and creating jazz, blues, folk – no other country has that. It’s always gonna be there for the world to enjoy. People at Newport presented it in its purest form.”

Though it seems that acoustic vs. electric instruments is an odd thing to go to war over, as Lauro notes, going electric was controversial because it changed the very communal nature of folk music in terms of causes like the labor movement or civil rights struggle.

“When you plug in, the guitar is louder than the voice,” Lauro said. “Songs helped fuel the civil rights movement. The Freedom Singers were all about getting Black people out to vote. When they got into trouble, they’d sing. When you’re singing someone’s song, they’re less apt to shoot.

“Songs during the civil rights movement were so important. If anything, this film shows the power of music. Rather than yelling, Pete Seeger thought he could solve the world’s problems by singing together. It’s a beautiful thing.”

The North American premiere of “Newport & The Great Folk Dream” is Friday, October 3, at 7:45 p.m. at East Hampton UA Cinema. The film screens again on Saturday, October 4, at 2 p.m. at Sag Harbor Cinema. For tickets, visit hamptonsfilmfest.org.