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Four minutes into the upcoming documentary Rick Nelson: Guntersville, we’re shown a modern edifice with ceramic walls, pizza-eating customers, wandering waitresses and a TV connected the partition tuned to sports. This is simply a important location: the tract of PJ’s Alley, wherever Nelson performed his last set, closing with Buddy Holly’s “Rave On,” earlier boarding his DC-3 astatine the Guntersville, Ala., airport, past crashing en way to a 1985 New Year’s Eve gig successful Dallas.
The film, directed by Nelson instrumentality Kenny Scott Guffey, an indie filmmaker who made 2022’s A Night of the Undead, illuminates the rockabilly pioneer’s vocation by focusing connected Guntersville, a metropolis of astir 9,000 people, galore of whom stay obsessed with the section tragedy. “‘Haunted’ is simply a bully word,” Guffey says. “They had conscionable seen him a fewer hours before, playing connected stage, live and vibrant and happy, and everything was bully — then, boom, they had the rug pulled retired from nether them. It’s decidedly thing that inactive affects them, arsenic a town.”
Nelson, who died astatine 45, is the film’s subject, but it’s not a accepted documentary. Early on, Guffey breezes done classical clips of The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, the ’50s and ‘60s TV amusement that made Nelson a teen idol, earlier featuring footage of him arsenic a state prima with hits similar 1972’s “Garden Party.” However, the movie is acold much funny successful the Guntersville characters who encountered the prima conscionable earlier his death: bandmates of the precocious Pat Upton, a longtime Nelson collaborator who opened the fateful concert; the nine owner’s wife; and respective fans who attended. The movie lingers connected an histrion wearing Upton’s golden overgarment — stamped with “Rick Nelson” and “Capitol Records” — which Lynn Upton, Pat’s widow, loaned to the production.
The subjects of Rick Nelson: Guntersville stay shellshocked 40 years aft the clang that killed Nelson, his fiancée, Helen Blair, and 5 musicians who performed with his Stone Canyon Band. “Nothing similar that had ever happened to our tiny municipality before,” 1 interviewee says.
Guffey’s archetypal thought for the movie was an “almost cinema verite oregon voyeuristic approach,” successful which helium would question to Guntersville and observe locations that were meaningful to Nelson successful his last days. But aft vacationing with his woman for their day successful June 2024, they detoured from Florida to their Somerset, Ky., home. They had an aboriginal meal astatine Pizza Ed, formerly PJ’s Alley, and, Guffey recalls, “I happened to look implicit that main room, wherever they person each their tables and booths and everyone eats. A information of the signifier was inactive determination successful the corner, and I’m like, ‘No fricking way. That’s the stage. That’s the stage.'”
Later, Guffey contacted the exertion of The Advertiser-Gleam, Guntersville’s newspaper, who enactment him successful interaction with newsman Sara Watkins. She introduced him to section sources, provided humanities discourse and came onto the movie arsenic a producer. “It changed the game,” helium says.
“I envisioned it arsenic benignant of lame compared to what it turned into.”
The film’s astir affectional moments travel astatine the end, erstwhile Guffey juxtaposes 1985 media footage with caller section interviews to portion unneurotic the chronology of Nelson’s level crash. Some were contiguous astatine the airdrome earlier the flight, similar Tim Hammond, who played keyboards with Upton successful opening set Headline, helped load the Nelson group’s cogwheel onto the level and hung astir the airdrome earlier departure: “I had this eerie feeling that something… was wrong,” Hammond recalls successful the film. Lynn Upton adds that her hubby begged Nelson not to instrumentality the flight, past returned location and said, ‘I don’t consciousness bully astir this astatine all.”
The plane’s two...
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