Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words features only archival footage of lives performances and Zappa interviews in attempt to create a more nuanced portrait of the musician.
On an episode of the old game show What's My Line?, the mystery guest was a strange and prolific rock-and-roll man – the genre's most committed iconoclast. After the musician's identity was revealed – "Do you have a mustache?" the apparently hip comedian Soupy Sales had inquired – an easily puzzled Gene Rayburn, speaking for many, asked a reasonable question: "Who's Frank Zappa?"
Zappa died of prostate cancer at age 52 in 1993.
With Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words, the German director Thorsten Schutte uses only archival footage of live performances and Zappa interviews in a fascinating attempt to satisfy Rayburn's curiosity. The Globe spoke to Schutte from New York.
Before we speak about the documentary, can you talk about how you first came across Frank Zappa's music?
The story starts at the age of 12, when I first heard Zappa's music in music class in the late 1970s. A music teacher allowed us to listen to one record of our choice from our school's collection. Next to the Bach and the Mozart and the Beethoven was an educational record of popular music on the Deutsche Grammophon label. There was one track, Who Are the Brain Police? by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The teacher put it on, and I was immediately mesmerized and drawn to the strange collage of sounds, the beauty of the melody and everything. I wanted to know more about him.
That seems to be an honest way to come upon Frank Zappa, from a Deutsche Grammophon collection rather than Rolling Stone magazine. From watching your documentary, I think Zappa would be pleased with that story.
Perhaps he would. You know, he loved smuggling a little message from other composers. If you went to a Zappa show, there would be allusions and snippets. He had his heroes, Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse and others, and he opened up a whole universe through his music to a great number of composers.
I think he would be happy to be on the same shelf of records with Mozart and Beethoven, too. Not to rank him up there with the greats, but one of the things I got from your film is a melancholy from Zappa, that he felt underappreciated as a composer.
Yes. If you look at the archival footage, there are reoccurring themes he would address. There was a constant frustration from his early days, even on the joke-cracking, cornball Steve Allen Show. Very quietly, almost timidly he says, "I'm a composer." The essence of his interest, even if it looked entertaining, was that he was dead serious about what he was doing. His experimentation, his improvisation and bringing the musicians to their limits, his entrepreneurial spirit, his positions against censorship – it's all there. It was all circling around his radical will for free artistic expression.
Let's get the style of the documentary. Why no narration or talking heads?
If you look at the archival footage and listen to him speak and watch his modes of expression and see him develop over the years, a different Zappa emerges from the one we used to know. I was familiar with his biography, and I was dissatisfied with the existing television documentaries I had seen. The people interviewed would perpetuate the stereotypes. Zappa sound bites were used. But over a longer time period, you see who this man was and what his habits were. If we want to see the nuances of his character, you perceive more if you meditate. So I wanted to change the strategy of the storytelling.
Your approach being the extensive use of pre-existing interview footage to let him speak for himself, right?
Exactly. I thought with a different approach I could bring so many more aspects of him to the forefront. That was the goal.
At one point in the film, he describes himself as an entertainer. How would you explain him?
I would say he was one of the most underestimated and undiscovered composers of the 20th century. That he was an inspiring, eclectic, daring, exploring musician who managed to create a body of work that seems so infinite. It's like a labyrinth. He's created a universe that, even long after his death, is a source of joy and inspiration and playfulness. You can hear it in his work, the sheer joy of playing.
Brad Wheeler