It may not topple “Toy Story 3” at the box office, but that is the premise of “Louis”, a 70-minute feature that had its debut in Chicago on Wednesday and will come to the Apollo Theater in Harlem on Monday as part of a five-city tour. “Louis” is one of two music-themed movie projects that Mr. Pritzker, better known as a songwriter and guitarist in the rock-fusion band Sonia Dada (and a billionaire scion of the family that owns the Hyatt Hotels Corporation and the Marmon manufacturing group), has been determined to make for some 15 years. The moment of inspiration came for Mr. Pritzker in the late 1990s, when a stage manager first told him about Charles (Buddy) Bolden, the turn-of-the-20th-century cornet player credited as a creator of jazz. “As the words were leaving his lips, I think it physically altered me,” Mr. Pritzker said. “The thought that there was this guy out there that impacted my life so dramatically, and I had no clue who he was, really resonated.”
Mr. Pritzker spent several years consulting with authors and musicologists on Bolden, a forerunner to Armstrong who died in 1931 and recorded little if any of his work. In writing what became the scripts for “Louis” and a second feature, “Bolden,” Mr. Pritzker concluded that it was easier to fabricate large swaths of his stories because Bolden’s history was nebulous, and Armstrong’s adult life was documented to death. “After he got to Chicago, everybody knows every minute of that guy’s life,” Mr. Pritzker said with some exaggeration. “On July 3, 1933, he went to a dry cleaner to pick up his shirt.”
Instead, his “Louis” puts a Chaplinesque tilt on Armstrong’s childhood in New Orleans, where a fictionalized version of the future trumpeter (played by Anthony Coleman) in 1907 plays a crucial role in a comically complicated affair involving a corrupt politician (Jackie Earl Haley) and a prostitute (Shanti Lowry) who has given birth to his child. Some of the film’s details — that the young Armstrong worked on the back of a coal and firewood cart, using his rudimentary horn skills to attract customers, and ended up in the Colored Waifs’ Home, where he further honed his abilities — are true or true enough. Others — like the slapstick antics that populate the film — are, Mr. Pritzker said, “mythical wanderings from my imagination.”
Mr. Marsalis, a New Orleans native who was approached a few years ago by Mr. Pritzker to provide the music for his films, said the director’s fictionalized presentation of his subjects’ lives was perfectly appropriate.
“We have a whole history of movies that do that,” Mr. Marsalis said in a phone interview. “I don’t think it’s a question of whether it’s O.K. or not. We’d have to throw out almost every film ever made on a figure. It’s not a documentary.”
Besides his own original compositions, Mr. Marsalis provided contemporary arrangements of classic jazz tunes like Jelly Roll Morton’s “Black Bottom Stomp,” Duke Ellington’s “Happy Go Lucky Local” and Charles Mingus’s “Boogie Stop Shuffle,” as well as several pieces by the 19th-century Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (those arrangements are played during the film by the pianist Cecile Licad). Mr. Marsalis said he hoped the live presentations of “Louis” would promote interactivity with its audiences, one way or the other.
“We always like to have people saying something, good or bad,” he said. “If they like it, we’re going to play more of what we’re playing.”
(“Louis” played in Detroit on Thursday, and the other stops are Bethesda, Md., on Saturday, and Glenside, Pa., near Philadelphia, on Tuesday.)
Mr. Pritzker, who shot “Louis” in tandem with his movie “Bolden” in 2007 (and spent more than $10 million in the process), originally planned to release the two films simultaneously. But he said the Armstrong film was released first because “I finished the ‘Louis’ film first.”
He added: “My wife said, you’d better do something with it or you’re going to drive me crazy.” “Bolden,” a traditional, two-hour feature with color and sound, and a cast that includes Anthony Mackie (“The Hurt Locker”) and Wendell Pierce (“The Wire,” “Treme”), will be released “when it’s ready to come out,” he said, most likely in late 2011 or 2012. (It does not yet have distribution.) Asked if he might have another film in him after these two, Mr. Pritzker invoked his experience as a pop songwriter, and said he could not imagine telling stories that did not completely capture his imagination.
“It’s so difficult, I can’t really see how people do it at a mercenary level,” he said. “I can’t see how somebody goes out and makes something they know they don’t love.”
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