Taking Woodstock
Taking Woodstock is the new film from Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee – and it’s a trip!
Based on the memoirs of Elliot Tiber, the comedy stars Demetri Martin as Elliot, who inadvertently played a role in making 1969’s Woodstock Music and Arts Festival into the famed happening it was. Featuring a standout ensemble cast, and songs from a score of ’60s musical icons including The Grateful Dead, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and Country Joe and the Fish – plus a new recording of “Freedom” from Richie Havens – Taking Woodstock is a joyous voyage to a moment in time when everything seemed possible.
Synopsis: Working as an interior designer in Greenwich Village, Elliot feels empowered by the gay rights movement. But he is also still staked to the family business – a dumpy Catskills motel called the El Monaco that is being run into the ground by his overbearing parents, Jake and Sonia Teichberg (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton). In the summer of 1969, Elliot has to move back upstate to the El Monaco in order to help save the motel from being taken over by the bank.
Upon hearing that a planned music and arts festival has lost its permit from the neighboring town of Wallkill, NY, Elliot calls producer Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) at Woodstock Ventures to offer his family’s motel to the promoters and generate some much-needed business. Elliot also introduces Lang to his neighbor Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy), who operates a 600-acre dairy farm down the road. Soon the Woodstock staff is moving into the El Monaco – and half a million people are on their way to Yasgur’s farm for “3 days of Peace & Music in White Lake.”
Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock Trailer
Focus Features has released trailer for Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock“.
The movie based on the book of the same name written by Elliot Tiber, follows his 1969 true story, an aspiring Greenwich Village interior designer whose parents owned a small motel in Upstate New York and at the time held the only musical festival permit in the entire town of Bethel, New York. Tiber (Demetri Martin) offered both the Catskills motel and the permit to the Woodstock Festival’s organizers. The film also focuses on Tiber’s life as a closeted gay man hiding his marijuana as well as sexual orientation from his family, and his self-discovery following the Stonewall Riots.
James Schamus wrote the script for the drama which stars Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Imelda Staunton, Henry Goodman, Jonathan Groff, Mamie Gummer, Eugene Levy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Liev Schreiber.
Focus is planning an August release for “Taking Woodstock.”
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