In 1972, Aretha Franklin (whose gestating biopic seems to have made no progress) recorded her best selling album (and arguably the best selling gospel album of all time) “Amazing Grace” at the New Temple Missionary Church in Los Angeles. Director Sydney Pollack also happened to be there with a four-man camera crew capturing the sessions for a still-unreleased documentary.
The film was apparently going to originally be released as a double feature with “Superfly,” but Warner Bros.’ was never quite sure how to release or market the film and ended up not doing anything, leaving it to sit in their vaults. After 38 years, producer/musician Alan Elliott has taken on the reins of the project from the late Pollack and will be releasing the film sometime this year, according to Variety. The film will still be credited as “a film by Sydney Pollack.”
But this is not the first time that someone has attempted to give the film a revival. Pollack tried to come back to the project numerous times throughout his career without success and only ever got a small part of it shown on a 1988 BBC documentary.
The film has no theatrical or DVD release date yet, but a trailer has hit the web (see below). We’ve done some cursory Google searches and it appears that this is being labeled as the trailer for the DVD. But we’ll have to wait for more details to arrive.