Harder Than It Looks
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Goehl underestimated how long it would take to edit more than 80 hours of raw footage down to a concise 66-minute portrait. He’d planned on doing it himself, but veteran editor Kathleen Dargis read about Goehl’s project in this column and offered to help. She agreed to accept deferred payment, and the pair spent more than a year putting the film together.
He also underestimated what music licensing fees would cost: of the roughly $80,000 he spent making the film, Goehl guesses that between $30,000 and $35,000 went toward obtaining rights to use the recordings, excerpts from television appearances, and performance sequences he needed to tell Martin’s story. “So many creative decisions had to be based on an economic reality, which is kind of heartbreaking at times,” he says.
Vinyl Decision
Postscript