The first rock ‘n’ roll musical film, Rock Around the Clock (Fred F. Sears, 1956), proposed that the new musical style originated in the vernacular folk practice of rural, socially marginal, youthful amateurs, here played by Bill Haley and his Comets, in a white rural community free from generational or racial conflict. But its narrative centres on an adult professional agent, Steve Hollis (played by Johnny Johnston, himself a singer and veteran of 1940s Hollywood musicals), who discovers the combo. “Talent,” he tells them, “is something you can sell for big money.” Taking over the Comets’ management, he develops them successfully, and the film ends with a nationally-broadcast televised “Hollywood Jamboree,” featuring them, along with the Platters, the most successful African American doo-wop cross-over group. Subsequent rock ‘n’ roll films, most notably Monterey Pop (D.A. Pennebaker, 1968), Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970), and other counterculture documentaries, would attempt to assert not only rock’s folk origins, but also its ability to create a biracial, eventually Anglo-American, music that united performers and fans together in an unalienated quasi-folk commonality.
Three months after the opening of Super Fly (Gordon Parks, Jr., 1972), the best of the blaxploitation films, and the only one to feature musicians in the narrative, another African American musical film re-engaged its generic themes of the devastation caused by drugs, but it did so in an inverted form and from the underside. It starred the most successful singer of the time, Diana Ross, in her film debut, playing neither a drug-dealer nor a bad blaxploitation chick like Coffy or Cleopatra Jones who would take their revenge on the ghetto pushers; rather she portrayed a victim, a revered singer whose career and life were destroyed by drugs, dealers, and pandemic racism: Billie Holiday, Lady Day.
Lady Sings the Blues (1972) was loosely based on Holiday’s ghostwritten autobiography, itself similarly loosely based on her life. Credited to Sidney J. Furie, it revived and combined two Hollywood genres, biographies of swing-era musicians such as The Glenn Miller Story (Anthony Mann, 1954), and The Benny Goodman Story (Valentine Davies, 1956), and melodramas about women who bring destruction on themselves, such as In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942) or Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945). Nominated for five Academy Awards, it also returned over nine million dollars in the next year, while the soundtrack album, containing both music and dialogue from the film, became Ross’s only solo album to top the charts and eventually sold over two million copies. Her talent was sold for big money, and Lady Sings the Blues was the first and most successful film from Motown, the record company founded in 1959 by Berry Gordy, Jr., who eventually controlled all aspects of its production.