Emmy, Grammy, and Writers Guild award nominee John Scheinfeld is a documentary filmmaker with a broad range of subjects and productions to his credit. His current documentary on Herb Alpert is a brilliant piece of cinema that will premiere in October. Occhi sat down with the Los Angeles based filmmaker and discussed his recent film and plans for the near future.
The documentary visually was successful in capturing each era of Herb Alpert’s journey thus far. What was the biggest challenge of putting this documentary together?
I would say the biggest challenge with Herb Alpert was length. He lived such a productive, lengthy life. It was difficult to fit it all in an acceptable time frame for the movie. It was quite a challenge. My first cut was probably three hours long. We had that much stuff. Happily, Herb is a “saver.” He has a vault. In the vault, he has saved photos, film, video, and other memorabilia. That made the job a little easier but molding and shaping it into a great film proved to be a great challenge.
Herb Alpert said in the film that the seductive part of being an artist is that you never get to the end product. From a filmmaker’s perspective, does that fall in line with your perspective?
Oh sure. There’s a cliche about the movie business that movies are never finished, they are abandoned. You can keep working on it forever, tweaking and continuing to mold things around but with the constraints of deadlines and delivery dates, you simply have to say “we’re done.” I see films that I have made in the past and feel that I should have done some things differently. I tend to agree that you never quite finish, and you always come to a work of art and see something that you think can be improved. I think that’s the curse of the artist. What I’m so proud of with this film is that we were able to capture the Herb Alpert that his friends and family know. We got him into an environment where he was able to relax and be himself. I’m so grateful that he was able to open up. It elevated the entire film.
What was your relationship with Herb Alpert and how does it differ from the many subjects that you have covered over the years?
In looking at the list of documentaries that I’ve done, there are quite a lot of subjects who are no longer with us. That presents its own set of challenges. It was just a delight to have a living subject with Herb. I had met Herb and his wife Lani once while making the Sergio Mendes film,
but I didn’t really know him beyond that. And when we started talking about making this documentary, I went up to the house and laid out my vision for the film over lunch. We walked around the property and probably spent about three and a half hours and finally, Herb said “okay, so what’s the next step? I said, “well, you know, I think you’ve got to decide if the time is really right for you to tell your story. You’ve also got to decide that I’m the guy you want to tell the story and then we can talk about the next steps.” He looked at Lani and simply exclaimed, “we’re ready.”
What’s next for you?
Well, the Sergio Mendes documentary was set to premiere in the spring, but since the virus hit, we were unable to do so. We’ve been looking for the best way to present it, and we’ll be making a big announcement about it in the next few weeks. Also, about a month ago, I started work on a new documentary. I can’t tell you anything about it other than the general description, because we haven’t announced it yet, We’ll be announcing it sometime in October. It involves music, politics, social commentary, a mystery, and it’s all built around one of the biggest bands of the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Photo provided by Beachwood Entertainment
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