Taking Woodstock

2009 American film

Taking Woodstock

Theatrical release poster

Directed by| Ang Lee
Screenplay by| James Schamus
Based on| Taking Woodstock
by Elliot Tiber
Tom Monte
Produced by| James Schamus
Ang Lee
Celia Costas
Starring| Demetri Martin
Paul Dano
Dan Fogler
Henry Goodman
Jonathan Groff
Emile Hirsch
Eugene Levy
Jeffrey Dean Morgan
Imelda Staunton
Liev Schreiber
Cinematography| Eric Gautier
Edited by| Tim Squyres
Music by| Danny Elfman
Distributed by| Focus Features

Release date

* August 28, 2009 (2009-08-28)

Running time

| 120 minutes[1]
Country| United States
Language| English
Budget| $30 million[2]
Box office| $10 million[2]

Taking Woodstock is a 2009 American historical musical comedy-drama film about the Woodstock Festival of 1969, directed by Ang Lee. The screenplay by James Schamus is based on the memoir Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert and a Life by Elliot Tiber and Tom Monte.[3]

The film premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival,[4] and opened in New York and Los Angeles on August 26, 2009, before its wide theatrical release two days later. It received mixed reviews and was a box office failure.

## Plot

[edit]

Set in 1969, the film is based on the true story of Elliot Tiber, an aspiring Greenwich Village interior designer whose parents, Jake and Sonia, own the small dilapidated El Monaco Resort in White Lake, in the town of Bethel, New York. A hippie theater troupe, The Earthlight Players, rents the barn, but can hardly pay any rent. Due to financial trouble, the motel may have to be closed, but Elliot pleads with the local bank not to foreclose on the mortgage and Sonia delivers a tirade about her struggles as a Russian refugee. The family is given until the end of the summer to pay up.

Elliot plans to hold a small musical festival, and has, for $1, obtained a permit from the town's chamber of commerce (of which he is also the president). When he hears that the organizers of the Woodstock Festival face opposition against the originally planned location, he offers his permit and the motel accommodations to organizer Michael Lang. A neighbor, Max Yasgur, provides his nearby farm land; first they agree on a fee of $5,000, but after realizing how many people will come, Yasgur demands $75,000, which the organizers reluctantly accept. Elliot comes to agreement about the fee for the motel more smoothly. Initial objections by his mother quickly disappear when she sees the cash paid in advance.

Elliot and Yasgur encounter a little bit of expected opposition. The local diner refuses to serve Elliot anymore, inspectors target the motel (and only his) for building code violations, and some local boys paint a swastika and hate words on the motel. However, resistance quickly dissolves in the tidal wave of peace and love (and commerce) brought to the area. The Tiber family works hard serving the massive influx of visitors and become wealthy in the process. A cross-dressing veteran, Vilma, is hired as a security guard. Elliot also struggles with hiding his homosexuality from his family, when he connects romantically with one of the event organizers staying at the motel.

On the first day of the concert, Elliot, his father, and Vilma hear the music begin in the distance. Elliot's father, transformed and enlivened by all the new life in town, tells Elliot to go and see the concert. Elliot hitches a ride through the peaceful traffic jam on the back of a benevolent state trooper's motorcycle and arrives at the event. There, he meets a hippie couple, who invite him to join them on an LSD trip in their VW Bus a short distance from the crowd. Elliot has trouble relaxing at first, but gradually melts into a psychedelic union with them. When they finally emerge after sundown, Elliot watches the vast crowd and brilliant lights of the distant concert ripple with harmonious hallucinatory visuals that swell into serene white light.

Elliot returns home from his liberating experience and has breakfast with his parents. He suggests to his mother that they now have enough money to replace him, but she cannot bear to let him have his freedom. Elliot storms out, facetiously suggesting his mom eat the hash brownies Vilma has just offered. After another beautiful day at the festival, during which his friend the Vietnam veteran, Billy, appears to overcome his post-traumatic stress disorder, Elliot returns home to find his parents laughing and cavorting hysterically, having eaten Vilma's hash brownies. The once-brittle family (particularly Sonia) is united in joy and delirious affection.

The next morning, however, Sonia inadvertently reveals that she has secretly saved $97,000 in cash in the floorboards of her closet. Elliot is upset that his mother hid this from him while he put his own savings into helping his parents.

After the final day of the concert, Elliot decides to move to California as he packs up his things and says farewell to his father, after his father encourages him to strike out on his own. As Elliot pays one last visit to the concert and looks out over the muddy desolation of the Yasgur farm, Lang rides up on horseback and they marvel at how despite the obstacles, the event was a success. Lang mentions his next big project: staging a truly free concert in San Francisco with the Rolling Stones.

## Cast

[edit]

* Demetri Martin as Elliot Teichberg/Tiber, who volunteered his family's motel to be the home base for Woodstock concert organizers which would take place on a nearby farm[5]
* Imelda Staunton as Sonia Teichberg[5]
* Henry Goodman as Jake Teichberg[5]
* Liev Schreiber as Betty von Vilma, hired security.[5]
* Jonathan Groff as Woodstock organizer Michael Lang[5]
* Eugene Levy as Max Yasgur, who owns the nearby farm[5]
* Emile Hirsch as Billy, a recently returned Vietnam vet[5]
* Paul Dano and Kelli Garner as a hippie couple in a VW attending the concert[5]
* Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Dan, Billy's brother and in opposition to the festival
* Adam Pally as festival co-organizer Artie Kornfeld
* Mamie Gummer as Tisha, Lang's assistant[5]
* Dan Fogler as Devon, a local theater troupe head[5]
* Skylar Astin as John P. Roberts, who bankrolled the Festival and co-organizer of Woodstock
* Adam LeFevre as Dave
* Richard Thomas as Reverend Don
* Kevin Chamberlin as Jackson Spiers
* Darren Pettie as Paul, the construction worker Elliot is attracted to
* Katherine Waterston as Penny
* Sondra James as Margaret
* Damian Kulash (uncredited) as a guitar-playing hippie
* Stefano Da Frè as Young Man #2

## Production

[edit]

Principal photography took place from August to October 2008 in New Lebanon, New York and East Chatham, New York, located in Columbia County, New York.

## Factual accuracy

[edit]

Elliot Tiber is the author of the memoir on which the movie is based (Bologna, June 2009).

Michael Lang has disputed Tiber's account of the initial meeting with Max Yasgur, and said that he was introduced to Yasgur by a real estate salesman. Lang says that the salesman drove him, without Tiber, to Yasgur's farm. Sam Yasgur, son of Max, agrees with Lang's version, and says that his mother, who is still alive, says Max did not know Tiber. Artie Kornfeld, a Woodstock organizer, has said he found out about Yasgur's farm from his own sources.[6][7]

## Release

[edit]

### Box office

[edit]

Taking Woodstock grossed $3,457,760 during its opening weekend, opening at #9.[8] After five and a half weeks in theaters, on October 1, 2009, the film's total domestic box office gross was $7,460,204 with an overseas take of $2,515,533. The film grossed $9,975,737 worldwide, thus making the film, from an estimated $30 million budget, a box office bomb.[2]

### Critical reaction

[edit]

The film maintains a 48% average on Rotten Tomatoes based on 179 reviews for an average rating of 5.4/10. The site's consensus states: "Featuring numerous 60s-era clichés, but little of the musical magic that highlighted the famous festival, Taking Woodstock is a breezy but underwhelming portrayal."[9] and a 55% on Metacritic.[10] However, the movie has a higher rating of 6.7/10 on IMDb. A featured review is titled as: "Does a great job of focusing on the side story, rather than the obvious big picture", while stating "...they actually focus on the how this all came together, which was great, because not only was the story very entertaining, but it created this essence about the concert, that it was something far off in the distance that you would never see, and you only heard people talking about it..."

Director Ang Lee and actor Emile Hirsch promoting the film at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times wrote: "... Lee and writer James Schamus aren't making a historical pastiche. This is a comedy with some sweet interludes and others that are cheerfully over the top, such as a nude theatrical troupe living in Elliot’s barn, and Vilma, his volunteer head of motel security, a transvestite ex-Marine played by Liev Schreiber. How does Schreiber, looking just as he usually does except for a blond wig and a dress, play a transvestite? Completely straight. It works."[11]

Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune gave it 3 out 4 stars saying "Screenwriter James Schamus doesn’t do anything as stupid as shove Elliot back in the closet, but this is no Brokeback Catskills Mountain. It’s a mosaic – many characters, drifting in and out of focus – stitching the story of how the peace-and-music bash fell together as it bounced in the haphazard planning stages from its originally scheduled Wallkill, New York, location to a cow pasture in White Lake. (Eugene Levy, working hard to restrain his natural comic ebullience, plays the dairy farmer, Max Yasgur.)"[12]

Stephen Holden at The New York Times liked the film, which he described as a "likable, humane movie" and "a small, intimate film into which is fitted a peripheral view of the landmark event". He pointed out that "Taking Woodstock pointedly shies away from spectacle, the better to focus on how the lives of individuals caught up by history are transformed ...the movie explicitly connects Woodstock to the gay-liberation movement and the Stonewall riots, which took place two months earlier that summer."[13]

Melissa Anderson in The Village Voice wrote: "Ang Lee’s facile Taking Woodstock proves that the decade is still prone to the laziest, wide-eyed oversimplifications ... little music from the concert itself is heard. On display instead are inane, occasionally borderline offensive portrayals of Jews, performance artists, trannies, Vietnam vets, squares, and freaks."[14]

Slate wrote: "After the long middle section building up to the actual Woodstock, the movie's treatment of the event is maddeningly indirect. No one's asking for a song-by-song re-enactment of the concert, but Lee's refusal to focus even for a moment on the musical aspect of the festival starts to feel almost perverse, as if he's deliberately frustrating the audience's desire."[15]

### Awards and nominations

[edit]

Taking Woodstock lost when it was nominated for the GLAAD Media Award for "Outstanding Film – Wide Release" during the 21st GLAAD Media Awards to A Single Man.[16]

## Home media

[edit]

The DVD and Blu-ray were released on December 15, 2009.[17] Special features include an audio commentary with director Ang Lee and writer/producer James Schamus, deleted scenes, and a featurette: Peace, Love, and Cinema. The Blu-ray features all the DVD features with additional deleted scenes, and another featurette: No Audience Required – The Earthlight Players.

## See also

[edit]

* Woodstock, a 1970 concert film
* List of films featuring hallucinogens

## References

[edit]

1. ^ "TAKING WOODSTOCK (15)". British Board of Film Classification. August 12, 2009. Retrieved February 25, 2015.
2. ^ a b c "Taking Woodstock (2009)". Box Office Mojo. October 1, 2009. Retrieved July 29, 2011.
3. ^ Novikov, Eugene (April 23, 2008). "Ang Lee Signs On for 'Taking Woodstock'". Cinematical.com. Retrieved July 29, 2011.
4. ^ "Festival de Cannes: Taking Woodstock". festival-Cannes.com. Retrieved May 9, 2009.
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Michael Fleming (August 5, 2008). "'Taking Woodstock' set to start". Variety. Retrieved September 1, 2008.
6. ^ Bleyer, Bill (August 8, 2009). "The road to Woodstock runs through Sunken Meadow State Park". Newsday. Retrieved August 25, 2009.
7. ^ Bloom, Nate (August 27, 2009). "Revisiting Woodstock, Other flicks, His son, the rabbi". Jweekly.com. Retrieved August 27, 2009.
8. ^ "Weekly Box Office Aug 28 – Sep 3, 2009". Variety. Retrieved July 29, 2011.
9. ^ "Taking Woodstock". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved July 29, 2011.
10. ^ "Taking Woodstock Reviews, Ratings, Credits, and More". Metacritic. December 17, 2009. Retrieved July 29, 2011.
11. ^ Ebert, Roger (August 26, 2009). "Taking Woodstock". Chicago Sun-Times.
12. ^ Phillips, Michael (August 24, 2009). "Taking Woodstock – 3 stars". Chicago Tribune.
13. ^ Holden, Stephen (August 26, 2009). "What I Saw at the Countercultural Revolution". The New York Times. Retrieved May 24, 2010.
14. ^ Anderson, Melissa (August 25, 2009). "Taking Woodstock Recycles 60's Tropes". The Village Voice. Retrieved July 29, 2011.
15. ^ Stevens, Dana (August 27, 2009). "Ang Lee's slight and gentle-spirited Taking Woodstock". Slate. Retrieved July 29, 2011.
16. ^ "21st Annual GLAAD Media Awards – English Language Nominees". Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. 2010. Retrieved February 21, 2010.
17. ^ "Taking Woodstock (US – DVD R1 | BD RA) in News > Releases at DVDActive". Dvdactive.com. Retrieved July 29, 2011.

## External links

[edit]

* Official website
* Taking Woodstock at IMDb
* Taking Woodstock at Box Office Mojo
* Taking Woodstock at Rotten Tomatoes
* Taking Woodstock at Metacritic

* v
* t
* e

Woodstock Festival

List of performances and events

Founders|

* Artie Kornfeld
* Michael Lang
* John P. Roberts
* Joel Rosenman
* Max Yasgur

Performers|

| August 15, 1969|

* Richie Havens
* Swami Satchidananda
* Sweetwater
* Bert Sommer
* Tim Hardin
* Ravi Shankar
* Melanie
* Arlo Guthrie
* Joan Baez

|

August 16, 1969|

* Quill
* Country Joe McDonald
* Santana
* John Sebastian
* Keef Hartley
* The Incredible String Band
* Canned Heat
* Mountain
* Grateful Dead

August 17, 1969|

* Creedence Clearwater Revival
* Janis Joplin
* Sly and the Family Stone
* The Who
* Jefferson Airplane
* Joe Cocker and The Grease Band
* Country Joe and the Fish
* Ten Years After
* The Band

August 18, 1969|

* Blood, Sweat & Tears
* Johnny and Edgar Winter
* Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
* Paul Butterfield Blues Band
* Sha Na Na
* Jimi Hendrix

Media|

* Woodstock (1970 film)
* My Generation (2000 film)
* The Road to Woodstock (2009 book)
* Taking Woodstock (2007 book)
* 2009 film
* Woodstock Revisited (2009 film)
* Woodstock or Bust (2019 film)
* Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage (2021 film)
* Trainwreck: Woodstock '99 (2022 miniseries)

Songs|

* "Woodstock"
* "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)"

Recordings|

* At the Woodstock Festival (1970)
* Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More (1970)
* Woodstock Two (1971)
* The Best of Woodstock (1994)
* Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music (1994)
* Woodstock (Jimi Hendrix) (1994)
* Woodstock Diary (1994)
* Woodstock 94 (1994)
* Live at Woodstock (Jimi Hendrix) (1999)
* Woodstock 1999 (1999)
* The Woodstock Experience (2009)
* Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm (2009)
* Live at Woodstock (Joe Cocker) (2009)
* Woodstock 1994 (Red Hot Chili Peppers) (2016)
* Woodstock 1994 (Green Day) (2019)
* Woodstock – Back to the Garden: 50th Anniversary Collection (2019)
* Woodstock – Back to the Garden: 50th Anniversary Experience (2019)
* Woodstock – Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive (2019)
* Live at Woodstock (Creedence Clearwater Revival) (2019)

Revivals|

* Woodstock '79
* Woodstock Reunion 1979
* Woodstock '89
* Woodstock '94
* Woodstock '99
* Heroes of Woodstock Tour
* Woodstock 50 (canceled)

Related|

* Woodstock Nation
* Woodstock Sound-Outs
* Chip Monck (festival master of ceremonies)
* Arnold Skolnick
* Bethel Woods Center for the Arts
* Hog Farm Collective
* Wavy Gravy

* v
* t
* e

Films directed by Ang Lee

* Pushing Hands (1992)
* The Wedding Banquet (1993)
* Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)
* Sense and Sensibility (1995)
* The Ice Storm (1997)
* Ride with the Devil (1999)
* Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
* Hulk (2003)
* Brokeback Mountain (2005)
* Lust, Caution (2007)
* Taking Woodstock (2009)
* Life of Pi (2012)
* Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016)
* Gemini Man (2019)

Authority control databases

International|

* VIAF

National|

* Germany
* France
* BnF data

*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template