Warner releases extended Woodstock doc on DVD, Blu-ray
3 Days of Peace & Music: Ultimate Collector's Edition to offer two hours of new footage
By Susanne Ault -- Video Business, 3/11/2009
MARCH 11 | Warner Home Video is pouring on the love for Woodstock’s 40th anniversary, packing in two hours of never-before-released footage into its June 9 DVD/Blu-ray Disc re-release of the documentary about the 1969 music festival that became a cultural touchstone.
The Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music: Ultimate Collector's Edition will include a bunch of collectibles.
Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music: Ultimate Collector’s Edition will be available on DVD ($59.98) and on Blu-ray ($69.99).
When the Woodstock project was announced last year, Warner initially expected to add one hour of previously unreleased concert footage. Now running at two hours, the new material includes 18 performances by 13 acts, spanning Joan Baez, Country Joe McDonald, Santana, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, among others. Five of the acts now included—Paul Butterfield, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead, Johnny Winter and Mountain—have never appeared in any film version of Woodstock.
Exclusive to the Blu-ray version are such features as a live community screening of Woodstock for Web-enabled high-definition players and a customizable playlist.
Both Ultimate Collector’s Editions will be packaged in numbered gift boxes and include a 60-page reprint of a Life commemorative issue. Vintage photos, festival memorabilia and an iron-on patch also will be in the sets.
The studio will offer a Woodstock first look to attendees of the South By Southwest Music + Film Festival on March 21.
Initially, Warner was circling a July 28 bow for the title in order to coincide more closely with the festival’s true August 40th anniversary. But the studio bumped up the release date to please an unspecified retail chain planning a Woodstock-related promotion in June.
Woodstock will represent one of Warner’s three major 2009 catalog tentpole titles. The other two are the Blu-ray debuts of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, both coming later this year.
Studio executives are betting that the extra two hours of Woodstock footage will especially attract consumers. Warner was able to unearth eight hours of previously hidden footage, but chose the best two hours of performances for release.
“Two hours is beyond rare,” said Warner executive VP/general manager Jeff Baker. “It’s not unusual for a filmmaker to have 15 minutes to an hour. But I’m not aware of any film that had two hours of content that filmmakers couldn’t get in originally.”
The title should enjoy a marketing boost from other activities planned around the festival’s 40th anniversary this year.
VHI Rock Docs and History is behind a two-hour documentary, tentatively titled Woodstock: 40 Years Later, bowing on VH1 channels in August. The project is executive produced by Michael Lang, the organizer of the original festival.
Also, the Ang Lee film from Focus Features, Taking Woodstock, will bow in theaters during the anniversary in August.
Warner also is rolling out a relatively more entry-level, two-disc special edition of Woodstock ($24.98).
Organizer Lang said of the decades-later attention, co-creators “Artie [Kornfeld] and Joel [Rosenman] join me in congratulating Warner Home Video for putting together this brand new and exciting look at our event and for unearthing more of the historic performances that electrified us at the time.”
