Beast editor Dean Gonzalez, who in 2004 in Los Angeles spent a year shaping endless hours of footage about a famous band into a feature documentary that the band and director waited 10 years to release so it would serve as a time capsule for the band’s worldwide fans.
And today, Oct. 15, is the national release for “Heart Like a Hand Grenade,” about famous punk rock band Green Day.
Its Chicago premiere is tonight at the Landmark Century Cinema theatre and Gonzalez is attending with a group of coworkers and clients. He will see it “Grenade” for the first time since 2005, when it premiered exclusively for Green Day fans, who traveled from all over the world to see it at LA’s Egyptian theatre.
The film goes inside Green Day’s songwriting and recording process of their Grammy Award platinum-winning punk rock opera, “American Idiot,” about three lifelong friends, forced to choose between their dreams and the safety of suburbia in a post 9/11 world.
“It’s both an intimate profile of the band and a time capsule,” comments Gonzalez, who returned to his native Chicago three years ago, joining Beast, after editing in LA for 15 years.
On the staff of Sunset Edit in 2004, Gonzalez had reunited with the doc’s writer/director, LA-based filmmaker John Roecker, a specialist in the punk rock subculture.
Roecker aimed to shoot the band as unobtrusively as possible, using a single handheld three-chip camera. Over nine months he amassed about 350 hours of footage “that was all mixed together from all over the place, at recording sessions, concerts and rehearsals.
“It took me six weeks to separate the footage., break it down and digitize it,” Gonzalez recalls.
“It was almost overwhelming and we had to find our way to tell the story organically. We wanted to really showcase how this album came to life, although we had no way of knowing how massive it would be at the time,” he says.
Working on “American Idiot” had become “my day job for a year,” says Gonzalez. “It had been a massive hit at the time and it became a critical smash musical on Broadway and in London.
“I think it was a good idea that John Roecker and the band waited ten years to release it, otherwise it would’ve been just another ‘American Idiot’ promotion piece at the time,” he says.
Along with the “Grenade” doc, the big DVD box will contain eight hours of extras about the band, also edited by Gonzalez.
Music is one of the editor’s specialties, having been a drummer at one time. “As a musician and big fan of Green Day myself, I appreciate how unique and special this project is.
“It was an absolute thrill to work on and remains one of the highlights of my career.”
Sidebar: “American Idiot” the musical, presented by The Hypocrites, performs at The Den Theatre, 1329 N. Broadway Oct. 16-18 and Oct. 23-25. Click here for tickets. The show was a sell-out in past presentations.
