OCEAN CITY — Bill Nicoletti was woefully unprepared to take on a film project. He had all the production and interview skills from years of running his own full-service video production company, but as for completing a film and getting it to market? Nada.
When his film, “The Philly Sound Heard ’Round The World,” debuts at the Philadelphia Film Festival this week, it will be, as he put it, like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
“I felt professionally I was ready to take on that undertaking, and boy was I wrong,” he said, laughing on his couch on a mid-October day with the breeze blowing in from the ocean visible from all three floors of his Southend Asbury Avenue home a block away from the Atlantic in Ocean City.
“I had no idea what I was doing. The production side I knew everything that I was doing. I knew how to put together a production, get my crew, I interview for a living. I knew all that,” he said. “As far as putting all those components together to make a finished film, get funding, get licensing, get a distributor, I knew nothing about that.
“It was a very expensive learning process, to say the least.”
Nicoletti has owned his own production company, Visual Innovations, for some 30 years. The company does TV commercials, branding videos, editing — everything to support what goes into production including filming, editing, graphics, sound.
A decade ago, Nicoletti decided to continue his work, but pivot into original content because he knew he was literally and figuratively sitting on a music gold mine about the Philly Sound. And it was sparked by a story about David Bowie recording his 1975 album, “Young Americans,” in Philadelphia.
Years earlier he was introduced to Sigma Sound, “the” recording studio in Philadelphia, and hit it off with the owner and founder, Joe Tarsia. He moved his post-production company there.
Over the next 14 years he grew his business at Sigma Sound, getting to witness a recording studio point of view and developing his relationship with Tarsia, who would tell him what took place there in the ’60s and ’70s.
One night, after a late session, he and Tarsia, both living in southern New Jersey at the time, went out to Ponzio’s Diner in Cherry Hill, where Tarsia regaled him with the story about Bowie’s recording session.
He told Tarsia, “We’ve gotta tell this story someday.”
But he wasn’t ready or even thinking about making a movie then.
Flash forward to 2014, and he approached Tarsia again about the movie idea. The Sigma Sound owner agreed “so we decided to make a movie on Philadelphia music.”
Nicoletti began filming in January 2015. Owning a production company, the production side was easy and Tarsia knew so many of the players and was able to connect him to people such as Jerry Blavat (the Geator with the Heater) and the O’Jays.
Back then, money was flowing into his business because the industry was thriving and he was able to take the profit from his regular work and put it into the shoots for the film because he wanted quality work.
He was about to learn that wasn’t nearly enough — and that was before COVID hit.
“That worked out for a really long time until we hit a bunch of roadblocks along the way in the making of the film,” he said. “I really had no idea what I was doing as far as the business side of doing a film. And the biggest obstacle with any independent film is funding. I really started with the only funding I had was whatever my company was capable of putting back into this film at any given time.”
“I just can’t
take it any further”
“The filming was really, really easy, but the amount of money to make an independent film extends far beyond the production. … Once you get into licensing music, that’s a whole other can of worms. Once you get into having attorneys involved, then you’re really going into another stratosphere as far as costs are involved,” he explained.
Nicoletti didn’t have the money for that and his film stopped and started multiple times while waiting for investors and pitching them. He was doing things piecemeal, not an efficient way of operating, making him burn through money much faster.
He was working with his expensive attorneys at Fox Rothschild, which was connected to the music industry in Philadelphia, and was getting discouraged.
“There was a point in the film in 2016-17 when I thought, this was it. I just can’t take it any further. It’s not going to happen,” he said.
“Joe Tarsia, who was a very sharp-tongued, quick-witted man, said to me, and I was really close to Joe, “Billy, you set your ship a sail, how are you bringing it back to the port?” I said, ‘Joe, I have no idea.’ And I didn’t.”
He told his attorney he needed about $500,000 and a Philadelphia-connected celebrity or artist to attach themselves to the project. She mentioned she represented musician John Legend’s partner, Mike Jackson. Jackson went to Lower Merion and Penn State. Legend went to the University of Pennsylvania — “and he’s a music guy,” Nicoletti said, “one of the biggest music artists on the planet.”
She made the connection.
Nicoletti showed Jackson “the sizzle” (sort of a highlight reel about the film) “and he loved it,” and they spent the next six months getting John Legend on as a partner.
“I’m broke, but John is an EP, an executive producer. Now some doors are opening for me to get some A-listers on camera. That wasn’t terribly easy at the time,” he said.
Nicoletti had been working for five years to get a Daryl Hall interview, but the Hall and Oates star was elusive. Legend helped bag that interview. And then “through osmosis” he was able to get Christian McBride, a famous jazz bassist, composer and arranger from Philadelphia, and DJ Jazzy Jeff.
Production picked up. And then came a call from a producer for Al Roker, the famous weather presenter and TV personality on NBC who wanted to see the sizzle. Roker was impressed and asked to become an executive producer.
Nicoletti met with him, was impressed with Roker’s knowledge about the Philadelphia music scene, but told him he didn’t need another celebrity behind the film, but was going to need introduction to help him sell the film. He said Roker agreed and ultimately got the introduction to the Peacock network in 2022.
Two years ago and he sold the film he began working on in 2015 to Peacock.
A major problem
forces new direction
“Then my next roadblock came. We were close to delivering the film to Peacock and then 30 of the songs we had applied for approval to use in the film were denied,” he said. “Songs we thought we were tacitly told would be approved were denied. So now I didn’t have a film anymore. Those songs were attached to stories that I filmed over the last five, 10 years.”
That meant 10 or 15 stories in the film had to go.
His deal with Peacock was terminated. Nicoletti had to make a decision.
“Do I shut down the film, which would have been the smart thing to do, or do I look back and see what I have and see if there is another way to possibly remake this film with other stories and new music?” he said.
“And that was kind of like the rising from the ashes moment.”
As part of Nicoletti’s side hustle, he’s an adjunct at St. Joseph’s University, where he and his wife, Liz Nicoletti (an Ocean City school board member) attended and that his daughter now attends. He teaches entrepreneurialship.
“A big part of what we talk about in that class is failure. … This was failure as failure gets. We had this film, it was approved by Peacock. It was going to be a Peacock original. They loved it. (Then) we have a record label that’s saying, ‘uh-uh, sorry, you can’t use our music. It’s not going to work out.’”
Nicoletti realized the first third of the movie and the last 20 minutes didn’t involve that music he wanted, so he decided to remake the middle.
Instead of interviews about the Philly Sound songs themselves, he knew he had other great interviews that didn’t make the original cut. Instead of the “inside baseball” about the making of the song, he turned to the stories of the musicians — “the relationships, the hardship that went into what these people gave up in their lives for their professional careers, what took place in the studios.”
Nicoletti believes he now has a better a film and said his close associates agree.
He said he was chatting with his wife over breakfast that morning and said if someone told him 10 years ago he could only have the songs or the stories of the people he interviewed, which would he take. “10 out of 10 times I would take the stories. You want to hear the songs, turn on Sirius.
“Not everyone likes the same music,” he said, “but everyone loves a great story.”
There’s a weird phenomenon that takes place, he noted. When people hear the interviews, they think they’re hearing the music.
“You’re seeing the Stylistics, you’re seeing the O’Jays, the Delfonics members. You’re seeing Jerry Blavat, John Oates. You’re seeing these artists that you connect to Philadelphia music, Soul Survivors, but the stories are so compelling and they’re so good at telling the stories it doesn’t matter what you’re hearing. You’re just paying attention to the stories and kind of hanging on every word. And they’re kind of steering you.”
“The Philly Sound Heard ’Round The World” doesn’t tell you how they made a song. It’s telling you how Joe Tarsia, Leon Huff, Kenny Gamble, Tommy Bell, Linda Creed, were all people of very diverse backgrounds that came together … in 1968, the worst possible year that people of diversity would ever come together. They didn’t care and that’s very Philadelphia by the way. It’s a melting pot. A lot of what was going on (in the country) certainly wasn’t going on in the studio at Sigma Studio. These people all came together, saw the gifts and talents that they had, and collaborated. That’s the story.
“It’s a human interest story more than anything.”
Accepted into the Film Festival and looking
for a big investor
At this point, after dialing up the production value, sharpening the film, it is now turnkey and Nicoletti hopes getting accepted into the Philadelphia Film Festival will spark the interest of a major investor.
His early investors were taking a gigantic risk because it was at first just a concept and rough, but now the risk is very small, he said, because the film is polished and they have three theater distributors — Landmark, Regal and AMC — that love and are waiting for the film.
“I just don’t have a studio behind me. We need half a million dollars to pay for the music, we need $250,000 to pay for the archives, like the Beatles footage, Getty images, all that, and then another $250,000 once we get in the theaters” to promote it.
“I have all this in place now. This is it. This film festival. This is our last great opportunity to see if we can get some type of funding, corporation, someone who reads the article and is a gazillionaire and says they love music, I want to be the hero, I want to be a producer, I want my name up in lights,” he said.
“That’s how ‘The Wrecking Crew’ (a 2008 documentary film about L.A.-based session musicians) happened. I think there have been so many films about Motown, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Taylor Swift. This story, Philadelphia music, was the real deal.”
He acknowledges Philadelphia has an inferiority complex, but it shouldn’t.
“From the late ’50s to the early ’70s, no one could hold a candle to Philadelphia as far as the amount of charts and records, gold and platinum records. There was no one even close. And it was very real. And it should be celebrated.”
Screenings of “The Philly Sound Heard ’Round The World,” with a Q&A with Nicoletti and editor Dexter Gresh to follow, are at 1:15 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 23, at the Film Society Bourse and 10:15 p.m. Friday, Oct. 25, at the Film Society Center in Philadelphia. Information at filmadelphia.org.
– STORY and PHOTO by DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff