A trailer has arrived for Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, the adaptation of the memoir Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life by Elliot Tiber, with Tom Monte.
The film tells the true story of Elliot Tiber, played by Martin, who helps organizer Michael Lang secure a concert permit in order to stage the famed 1969 music festival in upstate New York (incidentally, Woodstock celebrates its 40th anniversary this summer). The film was directed by Ang Lee and also stars Emile Hirsch, Liev Schreiber, Watchmen’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Paul Dano, Imelda Staunton and Eugene Levy as Max Yasgur, whose farmland became the stage for Woodstock.
Despite director Lee’s oeuvre of serious dramas like The Ice Storm, Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution, both Schamus and Lee wanted to make sure Taking Woodstock “is about play and fun and has hopeful spirit,” the producer said. So comedian Martin, who is relatively new to film acting, was cast to play the lead of Elliot Tiber after Schamus saw a video of Martin on YouTube.
Emile Hirsch talked about the mudslide scene last year: “The mud’s pretty cold. It’s later in the year than it was during Woodstock. We were all shivering, and we had these silver-foil space blankets that miraculously keep you really warm…I did a Superman slide down a hill, and started turning on my back. I was covered in mud. I think there was pig crap mixed in, because we all smelled like crap.”
The film hits theaters on August 14th, just one day before the 40th anniversary of the first day of the Woodstock festival, which began on August 15th, 1969.
Check out the trailer in which Demitri Martin introduces in his trademark drawing style…
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