On Tracking Angle! Harvey Kubernik's 'Screen Gems'

Making my Tracking Angle book review debut with Harvey Kubernik's latest, Screen Gems: Pop Music Documentaries & Rock and Roll TV Scenes

"Rule number one: every documentary has an angle.

I’ve experienced how a 'rock doc' can rewrite its subject’s history. In the twilight of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter Jackson’s radical re-edit (his angle) of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be footage swept a touch-starved Beatles fanbase. The joy! The memes! Glyn Johns’s fabulous outfits! Jackson’s presentation of the Get Back project fundamentally changed the narrative of the Beatles’ January 1969 sessions. There's something lost in writing this experience out. You had to feel it as you watched the Fab Four get to work, grow apart, and come together again on your little laptop screen across a ten-hour docuseries."

Having come from music journalism, Harvey Kubernik would know this rule. Screen Gems: Pop Music Documentaries & Rock and Roll TV Scenes is his third book about the “rock doc” and 21^st overall – and I got to review it for my first Tracking Angle book review.

Read my review of Screen Gems now, on Tracking Angle

harvey kubernik screen gems