Thanks to director Craig Brewer, Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson are going to Oscar after their emotional performance in the new film Song Song Blue.
The duo play as members of the Neil Diamond tribute band Thunder and Lightning, a homegrown husband-and-wife team from Milwaukee with the most unusual love story. If there wasn't physical evidence that Thunder and Lightning were actually real people, I wouldn't believe it.
Craig Brewer is as obsessed with the original Song Sung Blue documentary as I am – watch it below.
“I'm so glad you brought this up because where I first appeared [Song Sung Blue]”It wasn't out of narrative cinematic greed,” Brewer begins. “I realized the effort of what it means to be a low-budget, DIY director, no one gives you money, like Greg Kochs was.”
“To make a moving film and go to all the festivals you go to, and then no one buys you, that was my first experience. Long before that Vanity and flowI made this film called Poor and hungry. I filmed it and invited local people in Memphis, Tennessee. No one was getting paid and I had a team of two… I was one of them. I went to every festival I could go to. Sometimes you walk into a classroom and there are three people there. You infuse your project with all this passion and it’s never completely finished.”
He continues: “I was showing Song Sung Blue to people, and I had to order it from Greg, who would make me a DVD and send it to me. People would come to my house and I would ask, “Do you have an hour? Can I show you this movie? And that's exactly how I would show it. I would let people be a part of it.”
As Brewer points out, you couldn't find the original. Song Song Blue At the time, the documentary is neither about love nor about money, so this is an incredibly rare opportunity to stream it…especially for free. Even now, Kos distributes copies of the DVD himself, and after struggling to get the film shown, it's easy to see why.
Kos tried to submit the film to film festivals, but encountered persistent (and rather unnecessary, if you ask me) problems that set it back years. But fortunately for us and for Brewer, he was one of the lucky few who caught the story at the time.
“I had this rare thing that you couldn’t get, so I felt a real kinship with Greg, and it wasn’t until later that it started to feel like there were so many layers to the whole experience. I was one of three people in the audience at the Memphis Indie Film Festival watching Greg's documentary about a guy doing a Neil Diamond impersonation performing in front of an audience. I think we're going in the wrong direction when it comes to what we consider artistic success.”
“I don't like how box office receipts or percentages somehow now determine whether something is successful or not. I think people are striving for that, and they're not necessarily striving to find their voice in their families and communities, that you can actually find your best self by making art for the people in your life.
“I feel like we really need to start reaching out to local bands, we need to really reach out to local artists and somehow celebrate them more than we celebrate people who sell out arenas.”
You can see from both Song Song Blue the Thunder and Lightning films were such a success that you would be hard-pressed to know anything about them on a larger national and international scale. But both are worth watching—you'll notice some key differences in the storytelling in Thunder alone.
Finally, some 30 years later, both Kos and Brewer give them their moment.
![SONG SUNG BLUE - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in cinemas this Christmas – YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/ZqU7iiHFCzw/maxresdefault.jpg)
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