Seth Lewis Gordon Movies

Between 1998 and 2002, it seemed the Dixie Chicks could do no wrong. Their first major-label album, Wide Open Spaces, was a smash hit, topping the country charts and eventually selling 12 million copies, while their subsequent albums Fly and Home respectively moved ten and six million units. Their concert tours were consistent sellouts, making them the most commercially successful female group in the history of the recording industry.
However, things took an unexpected turn for the Dixie Chicks in March 2003; with the United States expected to invade Iraq in a matter of days, the group's Texas-born singer Natalie Maines said during a concert in England, "Just so you know, we're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." While the spontaneous quip earned cheers during the show, the Dixie Chicks soon found themselves at the center of a firestorm of controversy at home -- radio stations pulled their music from playlists, conservative political commentators organized boycotts and protests against the groups, and during shows the Chicks became the targets of death threats. As Maines and her bandmates Emily Robison and Martie Maguire weathered the storm, they had things of their own to deal with, including marriages, childbirth, and making a new album with producer Rick Rubin. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck teamed up to follow the Dixie Chicks as they recorded their 2006 album Taking the Long Way, fought back against the accusations lobbed against them, and struggled to hold on to their personal lives in the midst of intense media scrutiny. Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing (titled for a comment shouted at them by a fan) was the result; the film became the first documentary to enjoy its world premiere as a Gala Presentation at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The New York Dolls were a rock band who titled their second studio album Too Much Too Soon, and it summed up the band's career all too well. Playing hard, swaggering rock & roll that anticipated the aural chaos of punk five years before the Sex Pistols became a cause célèbre, and boasting an androgynous fashion statement that made David Bowie look timid, the Dolls made headlines and earned a loyal cult following between 1971 and 1976, but their look and sound were too extreme for the mass audience at the time, and the fact that several members of the band had serious drug and alcohol problems hardly helped matters. After the New York Dolls finally fell apart in 1977, singer David Johansen went on to a successful solo career (scoring hit records under the alter ego Buster Poindexter), lead guitarist Johnny Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan kept the band's sound alive in the Heartbreakers, and guitarist Syl Sylvain cut a few solo albums and occasionally worked with Johansen. But bassist Arthur Kane struggled for years to get his musical career back on track while battling alcoholism, with little success on either front. In 1989, after a stay in the hospital, a clean and sober Kane embraced the Mormon faith, and through his contacts in the church he got a job working in a Mormon genealogy library in Los Angeles. Despite his quiet new life, Kane's greatest dream was to someday play a reunion show with the New York Dolls, and in 2004 his wish unexpectedly became a reality when British pop icon Morrissey invited the surviving members of the band to appear at a prestigious music festival he was curating. Filmmaker Greg Whiteley knew Kane as a fellow Mormon, and New York Doll is a documentary about the ups and downs of Kane's life in music, how his faith came into his life, and his unexpected return to the rock & roll stage at the age of 55. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide