Company

When the film company was shown on the New York Filmfestival of 1970, riots broke out. The queue of enthusiastic cinema visitors who wanted to see the sold out show, had to be scattered by the police.
The documentary by D.A. Pennebaker deals with the sound-recording of the Broadway-musical 'Company' by Steve Sondheim. Sondheim is the composer of musicals like 'West Side Story', 'Gypsy', and more recently, 'Dick Tracy'. Company became the sensation of the Festival, although it concerned a 52 minutes long T.V. film.
The film tells the story of the 20 hours sound recording with musical stars like Elaine Page and Dean Jones. They were not filmed on the familiar stage but in a bare studio, while they are trying to transfer the atmosphere of Sondheim's work to the audio-tape, backed up by an orchestra of 45 people. The film registers the marathon session this involves. Every single note of the nine songs by Sondheim must be perfectly played and sung. The members of the cast soon forget that there is a camera present, which enabled Pennebaker to make a penetrating and sometimes defacing portrait of these people, working in showbiz. The emotions, the effort, and the fatigue that go together with these recordings are clearly readable on their faces. The star Dean Jones gets so impatient by having to sing his song over and over again that eventually he explodes: "Sing? I can't spit this time of morning!" Elaine Stritch makes a determined attempt to sing her difficult song in tune at four o'clock in the morning. She is dead tired, has no make-up on, wears old clothes. "Wrong! Ah, shut up", she shouts at her own recorded voice, and leaves the studio. Two days later, beaming like a star, she takes revenge. She screams of joy about the perfect last take. The film ends with this Happy End.
Due to legal problems, this fascinating film did not make a triumphal march through the cinemas, but was only shown on cable networks. Now, twenty years later and after a great deal of begging for a rerun by people who had seen or heard about the film, de documentary has been blown up to 35mm and provided with perfect stereo-sound.