New ‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ Documentary Is Ready to Go
A new documentary titled Becoming Led Zeppelin has been completed, though a release date hasn't been revealed yet.
Directed by Bernard McMahon, the movie, which was was initially announced in May 2019, marks the band's 50th anniversary and will include new interviews with surviving members Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones. The film will also feature archival interviews with the late John Bonham.
“Becoming Led Zeppelin is a film that no one thought could be made,” MacMahon said in a statement. “The band’s meteoric rise to stardom was swift and virtually undocumented. Through an intense search across the globe and years of restoration of the visual and audio archive found, this story is finally able to be told.”
According to a statement from 2019, the film "traces the journeys of the four members through the music scene of the 1960s, their meeting in the summer of 1968 for a rehearsal that will change the future of rock and culminates in 1970 when their second album knocks the Beatles off the top of the charts, and they become the number one band in the world."
Becoming Led Zeppelin will be the first time Led Zeppelin have participated in and endorsed a movie based on their career. MacMahon's 2017 debut, American Epic, which centered on the roots-music movement of the '20s, caught the attention of Page. “When I saw everything Bernard had done both visually and sonically on the remarkable achievement that is American Epic, I knew he would be qualified to tell our story," the guitarist noted in a 2019 statement.
“The time was right for us to tell our own story for the first time in our own words," Jones added. "And I think that this film will really bring that story to life.”