New Led Zeppelin Doc Clocks In At Over Two Hours

Some details have leaked out about the upcoming Becoming Led Zeppelin documentary, thanks to an online listing for an industry screening. LedZepNews.com reported the Venice Film Festival posted the film will run 137 minutes. No official release date has been announced, yet.

The site quoted a statement from director Bernard MacMahon as saying, “With Becoming Led Zeppelin my goal was to make a documentary that looks and feels like a musical. I wanted to weave together the four diverse stories of the band members before and after they formed their group with large sections of their story advanced using only music and imagery and to contextualize the music with the locations where it was created and the world events that inspired it.”

MacMahon went on to say, “I used only original prints and negatives, with over 70,000 frames of footage manually restored, and devised fantasia sequences, inspired by Singin' In The Rain, layering unseen performance footage with montages of posters, tickets and travel to create a visual sense of the freneticism of their early career.”

Jimmy Page told us that Led Zeppelin's initial influences from across the Atlantic solidified the type of music they would create over the years: “The fact is, all four of us, were so influenced by American music, and for me, the music that I was hearing in the sort of '50s over here, it was all a reinterpretation of what was going on in America. So we, sort of, had this American music, sort of coming in to us, and we were accessing it through the radio and records. That's a major part of why we became what we were — which is musicians and became totally seduced by this whole movement in music.”