“The T.A.M.I. Show," the fabled film document of an equally legendary 1964 concert in Santa Monica with the Rolling Stones, James Brown, the Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Chuck Berry and a half-dozen other acts, has a back story that reads like the inspiration for the Stones' observation years later about getting what you need even when you don't get what you want.
As originally planned, “The T.A.M.I. Show" was supposed to be considerably more than a concert film featuring several of the day's hottest pop-music acts.
Executive producer William Sargent Jr. envisioned the event, whose acronym stood for “Teenage Awards Music International," as an annual nonprofit concert series and award ceremony that would be televised internationally, with proceeds going toward music scholarships and programs benefiting teens worldwide.
None of that ever panned out.
“I think Bill was the prototype for the Zero Mostel character in 'The Producers,' “ says Steve Binder, the director of “The T.A.M.I. Show" feature film that arrives Tuesday for the first time in an official home-video release.
“He would come up with these great ideas," Binder recalled last week, gently chuckling at the memory, “but he tried to do them independently, and he always seemed to run into money problems."
Fortunately, that first and only “T.A.M.I. Show" turned out to be one of the most celebrated, and sought-after, assemblages of talent in pop music history, documented by the same director and much of the same crew that four years later would be responsible for the equally venerated Elvis Presley 1968 “comeback" special.
“One thing about 'The T.A.M.I. Show' is how beautifully shot it is," said pop music historian and documentary filmmaker David Leaf, who included Binder's film in a class on rock documentaries he taught recently at UCLA. “It captures that era in a way I don't think anything else does. Those extreme close-ups are just stunning: Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, to see them in the first blush of their careers, when they were young and becoming stars . . . . And it may be the best footage of James Brown ever. Rolling Stone called it the greatest rock 'n' roll film of all time, and in certain ways it is."
The DVD includes the complete feature film that premiered theatrically just two weeks after the concert took place at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium -- including the long-missing segment featuring the Beach Boys that was excised from more than 2,000 prints a short time after it first screened.
