Searchlight warms up to doc full of ‘Heart’

I'd give anything to see my French-speaking grandmother sing some Radiohead. Fending-off buying offers from Warner Independent and Overture, Fox Searchlight Pictures won the derby for domestic distribution rights to the loveable documentary that audiences at the Los Angeles Film Festival awarded with the international feature audience prize. Searchlight paid a hefty sum of under $2 million for the doc – a rare buy considering that the distrib arm never deals with docu-form.   

Stephen Walker's Young @ Heart is about a Massachusetts seniors chorus that covers tunes ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Coldplay. When the Young@Heart began in 1982 the members all lived in an elderly housing project in Northampton, MA called the Walter Salvo House. The first group included elders who lived through both World Wars. One of our members had fought in the Battle of the Somme as a 16 year old and another, Anna Main, lost her husband in the First World War. Anna was a stand-up comic who at 88 told jokes that only she could get away with. She sang with us until she was 100. We celebrated her 100th birthday with a parade downtown. We actually had to reschedule the parade for a year later when her family informed us that we had the date wrong and she was only 99. This initial group also included Diamond Lillian Aubrey who came on our first two European tours and wowed the audiences with her deadpan version of Manfred Mann’s “Doo Wah Diddy”. In later years she appeared “on stage” via video, performing the Stone’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”.

The doc will get a spring 2008 release date.