Big Suits, Lost Tapes, and Dancing Heads: Inside A24’s Incredible ‘Stop Making Sense’ Restoration
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Let’s say you’re a band — a famous and well-regarded one — and you are deep into a tour that’s ambitious, theatrical, and almost triples the number of musicians you normally have onstage. Once upon a time, you played stark post-punk songs and Al Green covers at CBGB. Now your shows are messing around with German expressionistic lighting, Kabuki tropes, and comically oversize suits. There are multimedia slides with random words and phrases (“Dollface,” “Drugs,” “Public Library”) projected on screens behind you. Your lead singer does an Astaire-and-Rogers pas de deux with a lamp. “Does anybody have any questions?” passes for between-song banter. It’s as much performance art as it is a rock concert.
So it might not surprise you to find, among the many well-wishers and hangers-on, the director of Caged Heat and Melvin and Howard backstage at your show one night, pressing the flesh and gushing about how much he dug the show. Still, it’s a little unexpected when he excitedly blurts out, “I see this being a movie!” Several months later, you’re playing four nights at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles, with a future Oscar-winning filmmaker, a crew, and six cameramen trying to capture all of this for posterity. The following spring, you’re premiering the result of your collaboration at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Forty years later, you’re dancing in an IMAX theater in Toronto that’s almost the same size as the Pantages, watching your younger selves playing your songs in what’s now considered quite possibly the single greatest concert movie ever made. You may ask yourself: How did I get here?
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It’s a question many of us who have seen Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece of a music doc on Talking Heads’ 1983 tour for their album Speaking in Tongues, have asked dozens of times over the years. There are a few others as well, like: Can this movie really be four decades old? Why does it somehow feel like both a time capsule and timeless? And how is it that the film, currently playing in IMAX theaters before opening wide once again on Sept. 29, looks and sounds better, and feels more vital and exhilarating to watch now than ever?
The answer to that last one, at least, is less philosophical, more practical, and something Jerry Harrison is happy to wax poetic on. There may not be a bigger fan of Stop Making Sense, or someone who appreciates what he, his bandmates, and Demme were able to capture, than the Heads’ guitarist and keyboardist. And though he and Eric “E.T.” Thorngren, the engineer who recorded and mixed the original albums, had been working their way through the band’s back catalog and remixing it in Dolby Atmos, the duo had not done anything to upgrade the concert film or its soundtrack. “Apple had been pushing their headphones, so we’d been doing these Atmos remixes for all of the old stuff,” Harrison says, via Zoom. “It sort of started with that. But we hadn’t touched Stop Making Sense. Then the stars sort of aligned all at once.”
For starters, the rights to the movie reverted back to the band. Harrison, along with fellow Heads David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Frantz, had self-financed and produced the film under the banner of Talking Heads Pictures. It was originally distributed by a company called Cinecom, which went bankrupt in 1991; from there, Palm Pictures picked it up. Per Harrison, the details of the distribution deal specified that the film would be theirs again after a certain amount of time. “Suddenly, we had it again, and the 40th anniversary was coming up,” he says. They wanted to do something to commemorate the concert film and began to reach out to see who might be interested in doing something with the project.
The band talked to “a few different folks,” Harrison admitted. Whether it was a matter of quality or simply an alphabetical decision, however, A24 was at the top of their wish list. The production and distribution company behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, Midsommar, Moonlight, and countless other 21st-century modern classics not only expressed an interest in acquiring Stop Making Sense — their execs wanted to give it the full restoration and rerelease treatment. And that difference meant the world to the group. “It wasn’t, ‘We’re just going to put it out as a streaming thing,’” Harrison says. “They wanted to get it back in theaters. I don’t know that I would have done complete Atmos remixes if it had just been a streaming thing. It’s spatial audio, so it helps to have the space.”
The movie was now the property of A24, who aimed to get it on screens once again in the fall of 2023. All they had to do was get it ready for the 4K-plus-Dolby bells-and-whistles treatment, which meant getting their hands on as many of the original materials and recordings as possible. And that’s when things turned into a detective story.
James Mockoski has been the restoration supervisor at Zoetrope Studios for more than 20 years, having overseen a number of reworkings and rereleases of Francis Ford Coppola’s work. (The incredible “final cut” of Apocalypse Now from a few years ago? That was his doing.) This past March, the archivist got a phone call from his friend Lauren Elmer, who happened to be running postproduction over at A24. The company just acquired a library title, she told him. Would he be interested in helping out with a 4K upgrade? The minute he found out it was Stop Making Sense, he jumped at the chance.
“It aligned so well with what I was doing with Francis’ work, in a way,” Mockoski says. “I wanted to know what they were working with, and she told me that the Talking Heads’ manager had got everything in from the previous distributor. They sent me a list, and there were almost no film elements included. There might have been, like, one screening print, and that was it. I asked, ‘So, where’s the negative?’ And the answer was, ‘Well, it should all be there.’ Which was … not quite the case. Not at all.”
“Keep in mind,” he adds, “this was back in March. A24 had already set a date for September; they had a trailer with David in the big suit, they had a deadline that needed to be met. And it was just like, we didn’t have enough to get this done.”
The first thing Mockoski did was call the Demme family, which had initially turned everything over from the estate to Wesleyan University. The archive was then moved over to the University of Michigan, where he found the materials that Palm had been using to make DVDs and Blu-Rays of the film for the past 20 years. The problem was, it was basically a second- or third-generation copy of the film. “It was like, we have a few copies now,” Mockoski says, “but where was the print that made those prints? The band wasn’t going to be in charge of the film elements; that was not their thing. I kept asking [producer] Gary Goetzman, ‘Are you sure it’s not sitting somewhere in your garage?’”
After going down a few dead ends, Mockoski finally ordered a “scan” of the best print they had and assumed he’d do the best he could with that. Time was running out. Then he decided to make one last-ditch effort to locate the original negative. On a whim, he called up Scott Grossman, who oversaw the library of titles owned by MGM. “I just said, ‘Look, I know you have no connection to Stop Making Sense; there’s no controlling interest, it’s not an MGM movie, and I can’t think of a single reason it should be there. But please, I’m begging you, can you just look and see?’ He told me, ‘You have no idea how many hundreds of ridiculous requests I get every day, there’s no way I can go chasing after every one of these.’ But I think I caught him on a good day, and he told me he’d check around and if he found anything, he’d reach out. I was like, that didn’t work.”
“Then 10 minutes later, my phone rings,” he continues, “and Scott has sent me a picture, with the caption: ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’ And there was the original negative for Stop Making Sense. It had been sitting on a shelf in Burbank and no one had checked it for almost 30 years. It wasn’t even used for the version they put out in 1999; that copy they struck from prints that were several generations removed.” When Mockoski finally laid eyes on it, the negative was practically pristine. “It looked brand new. There was zero wear and tear. Being lost was the best thing to possibly happen to that negative.”
A similar thing had happened to the original audio for the movie as well. Todd-AO, the postproduction company that specialized in sound work for theatrical distribution, had gone out of business, and the property owners in L.A. were going to tear the building down. But there was a vault filled with various projects that had not been picked up, or remained in limbo thanks to unpaid bills, and the word went out that any unclaimed item would be destroyed as well. Thankfully, according to Mockoski, someone — “I think it was Sony” — stepped up, rented a semitruck, and drove the inventory to a warehouse in Kansas in order to store it. When he began making phone calls, he inquired about any materials they might have on hand. And once again, he was lucky enough to strike gold: The original audio tracks had been sitting in a vault for years, untouched.
This discovery ended up being a huge help to Harrison and Thorgren, who had already begun a Dolby Atmos remix on the songs featured in the movie. They had been using a combination of materials they’d gathered from Rhino Records (which had planned to rerelease the soundtrack this August) and Palm. “It helped that he and I had mixed the original Stop Making Sense back in 1984 — not the movie, but the album,” Harrison notes. “We already had the reference points.”
But they, too, had found there were gaps that were slowing them down and slightly hindering their work. “I’d get an email from E.T., and he’d say, ‘We can’t find any of the audience tracks. How do we bridge the songs to stitch all of this together?’ And thankfully, once we found the original audio tracks, they had all of that. The only thing missing from the original audio were the overdubs that Demme did when he was editing and sound-mixing the film, to fix some mistakes that were made at the concerts — but then Rhino happened to have the mix that did have the overdubs on hand. It was just a matter of combining all of these elements like jigsaw pieces and getting the puzzle put together.”
There was also the matter of syncing up the sound and picture, which turned out to be an even more wonky set of hoops to jump through. It’s well-known that Stop Making Sense was filmed over four nights at the Pantages Theater (and that, per Talking Heads lore, the first night’s performance was by most accounts pretty rough). What’s even less well-known is that Demme was making choices based on the visual aspects culled from those four nights, while the band was choosing what they thought were the best performances of the song — and that, as Harrison confirms, the two choices weren’t always the same.
“The first thing we did was go, ‘OK, which version of ‘Once in a Lifetime’ sounded the best?’” he says. “’And which night had the best playing from us? That’s the show.’ But remember, Jonathan had six cameras running for each concert, and he was seeing something happening onstage between us, or from an angle that captured something he was looking for. So we might like Night Two’s version of a song, but Jonathan has footage from Night Four that looks incredible. We’d overlay them both together. Thank god we had Chris, who’s a rock-solid drummer! Or else we never could have done something like that.”
When Harrison’s recent comment about deciding not to fix some of Sense’s slightly off-syncs with this restoration is brought up, he says that the imperfections are part of what he loves about the film. “I mean, we had the technology to do it — but why? It’s more human this way. And the humanity of what was happening on that stage was what interested Jonathan the most.”
The fact that the band had the recordings transferred to digital tape — an unusual and quite prescient thing to do in 1984, especially for a live show — ended up being a huge help when it came to the restoration as well. It was a decision that the band made early on, Harrison says, “because we knew we were recording for film, and there are always reasons to rerecord when it comes to film. And we also knew that the more we did that, the more we’d wear down the tapes and lose fidelity, so the idea to do it digitally and not risk losing generations was the way to avoid that.” The only issue was that, when it came to using the DASH [Digital Audio Stationary Head] tapes for the restoration, it was near-impossible to find the vintage technology to play them, or find anyone who knew how to work the machines. “Luckily, our sound guy knows everything inside and out,” Mockoski says, laughing.
Both he and Harrison respectively marvel at getting all of this done in scramble mode and right down to the wire, in order to have everything ready for the restoration’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. That occasion brought out all four original members of the band, who hadn’t been onstage together since their induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. Their appearance at TIFF was cordial and slightly chummy [though each member was spotted on their feet and dancing during “Burning Down the House”]; by the time the quartet did a post-screening Q&A at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica a week later, they were holding hands during a group bow and actually seemed to be enjoying one another’s company. Harrison points out that Demme always envisioned this as an ensemble movie, “and that each character would get an introduction, they’d have their own close-ups, and viewers would get the chance to know them before the whole band sort of comes together. It was always a movie about us, playing together.”
“And what’s really great now,” he adds, “is because of the Atmos Dolby mix, you’re hearing every person playing on their own — if you want to focus on what Bernie [Worrell] or I are doing on the keyboards, or Alex Weir’s guitar line, you can really key into that now. But you’re getting a mix and a sound set up, with speakers all around you, and … I mean, I’ve seen this now with a crowd a few times, and it’s like we’re all at the show. Stop Making Sense has always been an incredible concert film. But with this new version, it’s a completely immersive one as well.”
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