Roger Ebert's Four Star Reviews, 1967-2007

by Roger Ebert

The making of the film was a happy accident. I remember meeting the director, Michael Wadleigh, in an editing room up in a loft in New York City, months before the movie was released. He talked about how he and his partner, producer Bob Maurice, threw together a production team at the last moment, and descended on the Woodstock site because they had a hunch it might be more than just another rock concert. What they came away with was 120 miles of footage, which an editing team headed by Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese assembled into a three-hour film. The balance was perhaps 60 percent about the music and 40 percent about the event itself—about how four hundred thousand people were drawn to a farm in upstate New York, where the facilities could not remotely sustain or feed them, hand where a thunderstorm soaked them, but where somehow they celebrated, as the film’s subtitle has it, “three days of peace and music.”