Thanks to director Craig Brewer, Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson are on the road to the Oscars after their emotional performances in the new movie Song Sung Blue.
The duo play as Neil Diamond tribute band members Thunder and Lightning, a homegrown Milwaukee husband-and-wife team with the most extraordinary love story. If there wasn’t physical proof that Thunder and Lightning were actually real people, I wouldn’t have believed it.
Granted, there are a few creative liberties taken with the tale, but it largely holds true to the original 2008 documentary by Greg Kohs. In fact, you can read the entire story about how Koh worked with the pair and struggled to get the documentary made on his website.
Before speaking to Brewer, I knew I had to read Koh’s journey for myself. Frankly, Making Song Sung Blue sounded so dramatic that it could have been a movie in itself. I put the idea to Brewer, who said he “completely agreed.”
There was never a moment when Brewer was going to make a movie or a documentary, but the “kinship” between the directors is incredibly apparent.
If you want to watch the documentary after the new movie, you’re in luck – after almost 20 years of being available only on DVD, it’s now streaming on YouTube for free.
Craig Brewer is as besotted with the original Song Sung Blue documentary as I am — stream it below
“I’m so glad you’re touching on this, because where I first came into [Song Sung Blue], it wasn’t out of narrative cinematic greed,” Brewer begins. “I recognized the effort of what it is to be a low budget, DIY, nobody’s-giving-you-any-money, filmmaker, like Greg Kohs was.”
“Making a touching movie and going to all the festivals that will have you, and then nobody buys your it was my first experience. Way before Hustle and Flow, I made this movie called The Poor and Hungry. I shot it on a video camera and cast local people in Memphis, Tennessee. Nobody was paid and I had a crew of two… I was one of them. Went to every festival I could go to. Sometimes you go into the audience and there’s three people there. You fill your project with all of this passion, and it never completely has a closure to it.”
He continues, “I would show people Song Sung Blue and had to order it from Greg, who would burn me a DVD and send it. So people would come over to my house, and I’d be like, ‘do you have an hour? Can I show you this movie?’ And that’s how I would show it. I would I would let people in on this.”
As Brewer points out, you couldn’t find the original Song Sung Blue documentary for love nor money back in the day, so it’s an incredible rare opportunity to stream it… especially for free. Even now, Kohs distributes DVD copies himself, and after how much he struggled to get the movie seen in the first place, it’s easy to understand why.
Kohs tried to get the movie on the film festival circuit, which was met with ongoing (and rather unnecessary, if you ask me) issues that set him back years. But thankfully for us and for Brewer, he happened to be one of the lucky few to catch the story during that time.
“I had this rare thing that you couldn’t get, so I felt a real kinship towards Greg, and it was only later that there seemed so many levels about this whole experience. I was one of those three people in the audience at the Indie Memphis Film Festival, watching Greg’s documentary about a guy who’s a Neil Diamond impersonator, performing for audiences. I think we’re kind of going in the wrong direction when it comes to what we consider artistic success.”
“I don’t like how box office or percentages are somehow now dictating whether or not something is a success or not. I think that people are shooting for that, and they’re not necessarily shooting to find their voice in their families and communities, that you can actually find yourself better by making art for people in your life.
“I feel that that we need to really start turning to local bands, we need to really turn to local artists and somehow celebrate them more than we’re celebrating people who are selling out arenas.”
You can see from both Song Sung Blue movies, Thunder and Lightning were such a homegrown success that you’d be hard-pressed to know anything about them on a wider national and international scale. But it’s well worth watching both – you’ll notice some key narrative differences for Thunder alone.
Finally, some 30 years later, both Kohs and Brewer are giving them their moment.
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