MOST FAVORED SON

Recreating the World Through Kurt Cobain’s Eyes and Ears

Nirvana at the Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver BC 1991.

By Charles Perterson

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Except for a few still photographs by local photographer Charles Peterson, AJ Schnack’s Kurt Cobain About A Son does not show its star’s face its final moments, and there are no interviews or concert footage. The film’s 96-minute length consists almost entirely of LA cinematographer Wyatt Troll shooting modern-day Seattle, Olympia, and Aberdeen—the cities where Cobain lived and developed his musical career with his band Nirvana before committing suicide in 1994 at the age of 26.

“We had a specific vision of how we wanted to make the film that was not your typical approach to a movie about a rock musician,” Schnack (Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns, 2002) says. “The idea was to see the world through Kurt’s eyes.”

The narrative centerpiece is an audio tape of Cobain himself recounting his life’s events to journalist Michael Azerrad as part of research for the book Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (Virgin, 1994). Schnack says he and Azerrad collaborated to build the concept of the film as less a documentary or biography of the artist than a meditation on Cobain as a human being—as he says, an “out of focus picture coming into focus.”

For the soundtrack, Schnack and Azerrad deliberately left out any of Cobain’s music, opting instead to focus on other bands Cobain mentions in the narrative.

“Kurt was famous for talking up bands he was influenced by and interested in,” Schnack says. “If he wore a band’s t-shirt, that was usually enough to get them signed to a major label. Kurt was someone who took all these different styles and bands he was interested in, and created a mesh of everything.”

The film’s songs, collected on a CD to be released by Seattle’s Barsuk Records late this year, includes underground contemporaries like the Melvins and Mudhoney, punk influences like the Vaselines, Half Japanese, and the Butthole Surfers, and larger-than-life rock stars of the 1970s that helped inspire the grunge movement, such as Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Queen, and Creedence Clearwater Revival.

“It’s stuff he studied and worshipped and adored,” Azerrad writes in the liner notes to the soundtrack. “It’s like a mixtape you’d give to a friend or lover to share ideas, not just about music but about your whole point of view.”

In one scene, a factory worker processes lumber on an endless assembly line at a logging mill in Aberdeen, similar to the one where Cobain’s father worked, to the backdrop of Queen’s “It’s Late” from News of the World. Cobain relates that he listened to the album frequently growing up, napping in his father’s van at the lumber mill and allowing the battery to go dead. “That happened a few times,” Cobain says. “We’d get stuck after work with a dead battery because I’d listened to Queen too much.”

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Aberdeen, WA

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Later, blues artist Leadbelly’s refrain “Lord, it’s a bourgeois town” plays against images of Seattle, heightening the sense from Cobain’s narration that his arrival in the city—a place that would become synonymous with his name to a generation of rock fans worldwide—marked a strange transition from his rural Northwest childhood.

“The biggest challenge with the music was finding the right creative choices,” Schnack says. “The music had to not only make sense with the specific timing in the film, it also had to have the right emotional resonance for the lyrical content. We couldn’t have someone singing ‘Love Me Baby.’”

Getting rights to the songs was remarkably straightforward, especially for a low-budget independent feature, says music supervisor Linda Cohen. “I won’t say it was easy—it’s never easy—but there was a lot of respect for the project,” she says. “A lot of people respected Kurt.”

She says that instead of paying the full licensing fees from the songs’ publishers, which together would have been disproportionate to the budget of the film, the filmmakers were able to keep costs down by offering publishers a “most favored nation” pricing agreement.

Through MFN, as the agreement is commonly called, filmmakers can request that song artists and publishers agree to the same licensing fee for every song in the film, regardless of the level of the artist. Thus, Schnack paid comparable amounts for a song by classic rock giants like Queen as for songs by small independent punk bands like Scratch Acid and Half Japanese. He declines to name the amount paid.

Schnack said that the artists involved were “incredibly generous” in allowing their songs to be used in the film, including agreeing to “most favored nation” deals.  Filmmakers commonly use MFN deals, as they are commonly called, to request that artists and publishers agree to the same licensing fee.  Schnack declines to name the amount paid.

Cohen, a professional music supervisor for many independent films, adds that one of the challenges of her job is tracking down elusive songs and artists, a process that was acute on About A Son. Half Japanese’s Jad Fair, she says, was a particularly tricky catch, since Fair not only owns the rights to his songs, but also administers them himself rather than his publisher Bug Music. “It took a lot of time to find the obscure ones,” she says. “That’s part of the intrigue of being a music supervisor. I feel like a detective trying to track these things down.”

Further enhancing the soundtrack is an original score composed by Ben Gibbard of the Seattle-based band Death Cab For Cutie, collaborating with long-time producer of Seattle bands Steve Fisk. Schnack says the two had never worked together before this film.

“It was a situation where we were trying to choose between the two [Gibbard and Fisk], and Ben said well, why don’t we work together,” Schnack says. “I liked that they were from two different generations. One [Gibbard] grew up listening to Kurt, and one [Fisk] worked with Kurt and they knew each other.”

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Director: AJ Schnack

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Crew Box:
Key crew from Seattle on Kurt Cobain About A Son:
Assistant Directors: Scott Stephan and Todd Glinsman
Location Manager: Heather Seedorf
2 AC: Bob Webeck
Loaders: Guido Ronge and Angie Bernadoni
Gaffer: Neil Holcomb
Key Grip: Greg Smith
Best Boy: Ian Jennings
Production Assistants: Eddie Adams, Cole Martin, Joe Fankhouser

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Cobain

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