Cannes is not lacking for glamor this year, even in the documentary lineup.
Among the films premiering at the festival is Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, an HBO feature documentary directed by Nanette Burstein and produced by J.J. Abrams, Glen Zipper, Sean M. Stuart, and Bill Gerber. The documentary draws on conversations with the star recorded decades ago for an autobiography.
“Entirely through the efforts of the [Taylor] estate, they were able to track those tapes down and reclaim them,” Zipper explained in an interview just before he flew to Cannes. “I remember getting an email from one of the trustees of the estate of a picture of the tapes in a box on a private jet on their way back to Los Angeles, strapped in with a seatbelt.”
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Zipper tells Deadline his production company, Zipper Bros Films, brought Burstein onto the project, a filmmaker known for Hulu’s 2020 docuseries about Hillary Clinton, as well as The Kid Stays in the Picture, and Oscar-nominated On the Ropes (the latter two films co-directed by Brett Morgen).
“I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say she’s a top five documentary filmmaker in the world,” Zipper said. “And she seized on those tapes and she determined that we don’t need to do any interviews for this film and we don’t need to hear third-party present-day hearsay witnesses speaking to her legacy when she can tell the story herself in her own voice.”
Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes premieres Thursday as part of the festival’s Cannes Classics section (it releases on HBO August 3).
“I think people are going to become acquainted with Elizabeth Taylor in a way they haven’t before,” Zipper said. “Over time, when someone is as iconic as Elizabeth Taylor, they unavoidably become somewhat of a caricature of themselves. The caricature controls the legacy, as opposed to the reality controlling the legacy. And I think this is going to get people in touch with the reality of who she was and how special she was and how groundbreaking she was as an actress, as a feminist, as a philanthropist.”
Zipper added, “There’s a lot of celebrity documentaries out there, but it’s a celebrity documentary the likes of which I haven’t seen before.”
The Lost Tapes is part of an ambitious slate of upcoming documentaries from Zipper Bros Films, the production company behind the Oscar-winning 2011 nonfiction feature Undefeated. As Deadline reported Monday, Zipper Bros is partnering with Ellen Pompeo and Sean A. Stuart for The Way Home: Dogs of the Last Frontier, a feature doc about Alaskan sled dogs preparing to retire from their grueling sport.
The company is also producing a documentary about the late John Candy in conjunction with Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort.
“John Candy occupies such a unique place in all our hearts,” Zipper observed. “John’s space in our minds and our psyches is about a warm and comforting feeling, a feeling of really associating John with all the things that make us feel happy to be alive.”
Colin Hanks, whose dad Tom Hanks starred with Candy in Splash and Volunteers, is directing.
“You can’t think of a film of John Candy’s — if you turned it on the day where you were in a bad mood and you gave him 90 minutes of your life — there’s no way you don’t come out the other side feeling better,” Zipper noted. “And so the documentary’s going to have to do the same thing. And that’s Colin’s vision… He wants the John Candy documentary to leave you with the same sort of feeling you would have seeing a John Candy scripted film.”
Zipper Bros goes airborne later this week with the IMAX debut of The Blue Angels, a documentary on the Navy’s renowned Flight Demonstration Squadron. “The immersive footage puts you in the cockpit for a firsthand view of the Blue Angels’ precision flying,” notes a synopsis of the documentary, “while the aerial shots deliver a spectacular showcase of the breathtaking maneuvers that have made them the world’s premier jet team.”
The Blue Angels, from Amazon MGM Studios and IMAX, will run in IMAX theaters from May 17-23, then premiere on Prime Video on May 23 (Zipper said a shorter version of the film will come out later “that will live forever, and it’ll be in IMAX institutional theaters for 20 years.”).
Zipper commented, “It’s the biggest project I’ve ever been a part of. As a documentary producer, you don’t often get an opportunity to make an action film, and that’s what’s this is… We were able to have helicopters within the Blue Angels airspace filming with IMAX-enabled cameras, which is something that’s never — the Blue Angels don’t let anyone in their airspace, ever. It’s so dangerous. They fly at 400 miles an hour.”
Zipper, J.J. Abrams, Top Gun: Maverick star Glen Powell, Hannah Minghella, and Mark Monroe are among the producers of The Blue Angels, while Greg Wooldridge, a retired Navy captain who commanded the Blue Angels for three tours, serves as an EP.
“As you watch it, your palms are going to sweat,” Zipper promised. “You’re just not going to believe what you’re seeing. And the other thing, it’s not just spectacle. We get to know these men and women who make up this team and they are made — it’s a cliche, but it’s true — of the right stuff… It’s such a thrilling ride to go on with characters that people are just going to fall in love with.”
Before founding Zipper Bros Films with his brother Ralph, Glen served as an assistant prosecutor in New Jersey. That experience may have served him well for his current career path.
“Every day is life and death in Hollywood. And going back to my former life, it really was life and death every day,” he noted. “So when I have a crisis in the film business, I sometimes have to remind myself, well, it ain’t life and death.”
He added, “I think also there’s the business side that we all have to engage in every day. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that someone has a malicious and malevolent intent to get one over on you, but there is gamesmanship, and I think that people are a little bit more on their toes with me, like ‘This guy used to be a serious attorney. Maybe we can’t use the same old card trick on him because he’s going to smoke it out.’ So, I think maybe that’s helped me a little bit too.”
Zipper Bros productions have run the gamut of documentary genres – music and celebrity (Elvis Presley: The Searcher, Zappa), sports (Sey Hey, Willie Mays!, Undefeated, What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali), true crime (Chowchilla), space and aviation (The Blue Angels, Challenger: The Final Flight), and a good deal more. At a time when many documentary filmmakers are struggling to find distribution for their work, Zipper Bros has managed to keep expanding.
“We’re in a moment of change. It is undeniable,” Zipper said of the documentary field. “I think the mistake that we can make is trying to wrap our arms around it, decode it, understand it, and think we’ve come up with a strategy for navigating it because that presumes that it is going to, anytime soon, reach a place of stasis and predictability.”
He continued, “We’re in the cocoon stage — we don’t know what’s inside. And so I think that what we need to do is acknowledge that fact, not try and crack the code at this point, because it would be premature to come up with any sort of long-term strategy for dealing with it. And we just have to be more like surfers toward not trying to defeat the wave. We need to ride the wave.”
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