The Story Behind the Credits for ’20 Feet From Stardom’
For the opening credits of “20 Feet From Stardom,” the director Morgan Neville was looking for a playful way to put backup singers, the subjects of the documentary, into the spotlight. He found inspiration in vintage album covers and photographs, but also more surprisingly in the work of the artist John Baldessari. In a homage to Mr. Baldessari’s well-known images of people with dots covering their faces, dots were applied to lead singers to emphasize the performers behind them.
Mr. Neville developed the idea with one of his producers, Gil Friesen, and the music executive Jeff Ayeroff, who came up with the idea of referencing the artist. Initially, Mr. Friesen thought the concept might be too clever for a credit sequence, Mr. Neville recalled, but the director gave it a try anyway. “I printed out some pictures, took some stickers, put them on the faces of lead singers, scanned them back into the computer and did a quick temp version of what it would look like,” Mr. Neville said in a phone interview. “I surprised Gil with it and he loved it.”
The graphic designer Scott Grossman, working with Mr. Neville, built the sequence using, along with the dot-covered faces, album covers featuring the subjects of the movie, all set to the Lou Reed song that calls out his backup singers, “Walk on the Wild Side.” “One thing that Gil and I had bonded over when we started making this film was our love of modern art,” Mr. Neville said. “This was a great, subversive way to get a passion of ours into the movie.” Besides, Mr. Neville said, the sequence makes an important point: “It’s about retraining your eye as much as the film is also about retraining your ear.”