May 2011: "9/11 : THE DAY THAT CHANGED THE WORLD"

I am in the late stages of editing my 92 minute documentary for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The film tells the inside story of what happened on that day through the memories of America's key decision makers – including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

We go behind the scenes in Washington and New York to show how, minute by minute, people at the heart of American power struggled to manage an unprecedented assault on their nation.

The film follows the story of 9/11 entirely through pictures and sounds recorded on that day, from the President's early morning run, through the shocking sequence of strikes by highjacked planes in New York and Washington, to extraordinary sequences filmed on Air Force One as it evacuated the President on a flight across America. The film will be screened on ITV in September, and also in America, France and Japan.

April 2011: "HOW THE BEATLES ROCKED THE KREMLIN"

Following my BBC film about the impact of the Beatles in the USSR, I have been commissioned by Bloomsbury USA to write a book exploring the untold story of the Soviet Union's battles with popular music – from Jazz in the 1920s to the Beatles and beyond.

Dismaying and hilarious, the book will take me from Minsk and Moscow from Kiev to Vladivostok in pursuit of the musicians and fans who have kept faith with their music over decades of official repression.

We aim to publish in 2012 – the 50th anniversary of the Beatles first record.

Shooting the Past: Unseen Beatles photos from 1963

I took these pictures on January 16, 1963 when the Beatles came into the Manchester studios of Granada Television to perform their new record “Please Please Me”. I had got to know the Beatles a few months earlier in August 1962 when, as a very raw young TV director, I made the first ever film of the Fab Four at the Cavern Club in Liverpool – shortly before they made their first record. I had followed them around in the fall of 1962 as they played local clubs and ballrooms, but by the time they came to our studios for “Please Please me” - and I took these pictures - there were ten thousand kids outside trying to break down the doors.

I only rediscovered the negatives recently, so the prints have never been seen before. The 8 Silver Gelatin Prints, each 14in x 11 ins, are signed and dated “Manchester 1963”. The prints have been made by Peter Guest at THE IMAGE in London. Peter prints for the Linda McCartney archive.

Click on any of the images below for a slideshow.

Herman Leonard: Working with a Legend

I worked with the great Jazz photographer, Herman Leonard on a new book of his pictures shortly before his sad death in 2010.

I first got to know Herman when I made a documentary with him for the BBC, "SAVING JAZZ", about the struggle to bring the music back to New Orleans after the devastations of Hurricane Katrina - in which he lost ten thousand of his exquisite prints.

I have always loved his photographs since I got to know them as a jazz-addicted teenager, and I'll never forget being alongside Herman in 2005 when he began the work of reprinting his archive in the only surviving darkroom in New Orleans.

Before his untimely death, we collaborated on the new book, called simply Jazz, which includes a range of previously unseen photographs he has recently excavated from his archive.

The book is published by Atlantic Books (UK) .

September 2009: Reviews of How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin

Variety (November 05, 2009)

OK, I swear, I'll stop ranting right after this about how that last Ken Burns "The National Parks" documentary didn't need to run for 12 hours, but watching "How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin" on PBS provides a great reminder of crisp, economical documentary storytelling., The one-hour special will air Nov. 9 and marks the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down. Yet producer-director-narrator Leslie Woodhead makes a stirring case about how the Beatles -- at least as much as all the spy-counterspy antics of the Cold War years -- befuddled and undermined Kremlin leaders, speaking to a generation of Soviet youths who were wildly enamored with the Fab Four's music., HowTheBeatlesRocked, Woodhead interviews a wide assortment of Russians who privately rocked to Beatles songs, interspersed with footage of the boring state-run entertainment that the kids there rejected. He also talks of the legend of an impromptu "secret concert" spurred by the group's "Back in the U.S.S.R.," and eventually illustrates the Beatles' triumph over the Soviet leadership when we see a Russian Perry Como type singing a very stiff version of "Hey Jude.", Russia's deputy premier, Sergei Ivanov, can't seem to suppress a big goofy grin as he talks about learning English in part by listening to smuggled Beatles records, and Woodhead speaks to Beatles cover bands that remain prevalent throughout the old Soviet bloc to this today. The spec culminates with Paul McCartney performing to what can only be described as rapturous fans., All told, it's both an enlightening and inordinately fun look at how the Beatles' influence might actually have been more significant within the Soviet Union than the west. And did this WNET-backed production really do all that in an hour?, Yeah yeah yeah.

John Lloyd, Financial Times

Most charming programme of the past week was Leslie Woodhead’s contribution to Beatles’ week (Storyville: How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin, BBC4 Monday), on how the group undermined the Soviet Union. Here [Woodhead ] returns to a theme he broached in a tremendous 1992 piece (with Reggie Nadelson) on Dean Reed, the American rock singer adopted by the Soviet Union: the place and effect of rock in a closed ideological system. …The real glory of the film was the people and events it captured: Josif Kobzon, the USSR’s official songster, doing “Hey Jude”; Belorussian rocker Yuri Pelyushonok getting his old combo together to sing a special composition on the effect of the Beatles (“Hey, pal, don’t wake the people!”); and best of all, Kolya Vasin – “I’m sure God sent them to us” – a bearded Russian mystic out of Dostoyevsky by way of Liverpool, who created the Beatles museum over 40 devoted, demented years. This Storyville production showed what one can do with care, time and devotion: lead us to understand something of the universe so that we can be, not its masters, but a little more its citizens.

The Scotsman

Storyville – How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin presents a refreshingly different perspective on their significance, by showing how their music may have contributed to the collapse of the USSR. It sounds like a ludicrously lofty claim, but renowned documentary filmmaker Leslie Woodhead, with the help of several ageing fans (including Putin's deputy prime minister), argues persuasively that their music – banned in the USSR and bootlegged by teenagers – instilled dreams of hope and freedom of expression within an entire generation, which eventually led to the demise of communism. If we must have new documentaries about the Beatles, then they should be from interesting new angles such as this.