This is the fifth of a series of reviews of movies showing at the New Haven Documentary Film Festival, or NHDocs, which runs through June 9 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, the main branch of the New Haven Free Public Library, Cafe Nine, and the State House. Click here for a full schedule of screenings.
Writer and director Joe LaDore sets out to fulfill his lifelong desire to make his own television pilot in his endearing film Cover Band: The Making of an Independent Pilot, which documents the inception and creation of one episode of a show about friends who form — you guessed it — a cover band. The show is loosely based on LaDore’s life: He actually played in such a band, Mean Carlene, for ten years.
From recruiting friends and family to help make and be in the film to the extended late-night hours of post-production, LaDore captures all the fun amid the frustrations that he, the crew, and the cast had while making LaDore’s dream come true.
The film also includes the pilot in its entirety, and it definitively pays homage to the sitcoms that LaDore, a self-proclaimed “child of the ‘80s,” grew up watching and loving. Sprinkled with cutaways, voiceovers, and nods to classic sitcoms, the laugh track-laced story of friends who work in an office by day and put together a cover band to play in at night — and the characters and situations they encounter in doing so — generates laughs.
It also renews the sense of camaraderie and playfulness witnessed while watching the making of it. Who knows? It may even inspire another would-be filmmaker to do something similar if it means having this much of a good time.
Cover Band screens June 4 at 9 p.m. in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St.
