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[ The Last Play at Shea ]



"'Last Play at Shea' Documentary Tells Stadium's Story"
By: Glenn Gamboa
(April 21st, 2010)

The decision for Paul McCartney to play "Let It Be" as the final song at Shea Stadium came from a last-minute conversation backstage with Billy Joel while fans were still screaming after Joel delivered "Piano Man."

That's just one of the many behind-the-scenes revelations from "Last Play at Shea," the documentary chronicling the life of Shea Stadium and Billy Joel's final concerts there in 2008. The film is set to make its world premiere Sunday at the Tribeca Film Festival.

"It was poetic," Joel said of the decision, adding that having McCartney bookend the musical history of the stadium was "the perfect ending" for Shea.

"It was really this thing coming full circle," McCartney added.

Though the 90-minute film, directed by Paul Crowder for Maritime Films, focuses on Joel's historic concerts at Shea and uses his music to tell the stories of the stadium, "The Last Play at Shea" is more about the history of the place and its impact on the area and those who called it home. "It's a dump," said Mets outfielder Darryl Strawberry, "but it's our dump."

Using historical footage and animation, the documentary puts Shea into the broader context of the rise of the suburbs and how Long Island, in general, and Joel, specifically, reflected that shift in American life. That backdrop is designed to give lifelong fans of the Mets and Joel a new way of looking at the events that have already been woven into the fabric of their lives.

Of course, what lifelong fan of the Mets wouldn't want to relive the triumphant '69 World Series and the miraculous Game Six of the '86 Series on the big screen?

Joel tries to put his own miraculous climb from The Hassles to playing Shea with his idol McCartney into context, as well. "I'm a kid from Levittown," Joel said. "I don't even look like a rock star...I don't believe this is going on."

Other revelations:

Sting decided to go solo from The Police while they performed at Shea in '83 because playing there was "Everest."

Alexa Ray Joel talks about dealing with the divorce of her parents, Joel and Christie Brinkley. "I was heartbroken as any child is," she said. "But I wasn't surprised."


"Billy Joel, Ex-Drummer Settle Royalty Lawsuit"
By: Jonathan Stempel
(April 21st, 2010)

Billy Joel's longtime drummer has settled a lawsuit accusing his former boss of depriving him of royalties from many of his biggest albums, the singer's lawyer said on Wednesday.

Liberty DeVitto was Joel's principal drummer from 1975 to 2005, performing on such albums as "The Stranger," "52nd Street," "Glass Houses" and "Storm Front," as well as in Joel's touring band.

In his May 2009 lawsuit, DeVitto alleged that Joel breached agreements to pay him unspecified royalties based on sales of 11 albums that were recorded between 1975 and 1990, and which collectively sold more than 100 million units worldwide.

Joel's recording company, Sony Music Entertainment Inc., was also named as a defendant.

"The case has been amicably resolved," said Paul LiCalsi, a partner at Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp, LLP in New York, who represents Joel. He declined to discuss settlement terms.

DeVitto's lawyer did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

A notation that the lawsuit has been dropped appears on the docket of the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

The case is DeVitto vs. Joel et al., New York State Supreme Court, New York County, No. 107122/2009.


"Film Finds Billy Joel's New York Mets State of Mind"
By: Larry Getlen
(April 25th, 2010)

What do the Mets and Billy Joel have in common, other than a propensity for sudden crashes? More than you'd think, according to a documentary premiering tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival.

"The Last Play at Shea" focuses on Joel's 2008 concert at Shea Stadium, the last ever at the doomed venue. The show intertwines with the life stories of the singer, Shea and the Amazin's.

"The Mets dropped off as New York was in big trouble [in the '70s], and Billy moved back to New York from LA in '76 and wrote 'New York State of Mind,'" says director Paul Crowder. "We chart those stories and all the ups and downs happening at the same time. And throughout, the concert is driving the story."

So while the film tells three separate stories, it connects them in surprising ways. Take the tale of the Mets' first game at Shea Stadium after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks.

"Mike Piazza hit a home run late in the game," says Crowder. "It was very emotional, and the concert music played underneath it is 'Goodnight Saigon,' because Billy had the fire department and police choirs singing onstage with him. There were firemen almost crying at the game, and [the shot] dissolves into firemen singing with Billy. It makes for a powerful moment."

Elsewhere, Joel tells how seeing The Beatles at Shea inspired him, which leads to him playing the last show at Shea with Paul McCartney. We also learn how miraculous it was that McCartney even got there that night, given that his plane from England didn't land at John F. Kennedy International Airport until 11:00pm.

"They got somebody at air traffic control - I think it was through Billy Joel's dentist - to clear airspace so Paul McCartney's plane could land early," says Crowder. "They put him in a car with a police escort, and 'flew' him to Shea Stadium in 11 minutes."

While the film touches briefly on Joel's rougher patches - financial battles with a former manager are scored to "Honesty" - Crowder focused on positive moments, such as Christie Brinkley saying she'd always wanted the best for Billy, with "Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)" playing behind her.

Crowder could have simply made a biopic or concert film, but this "is more interesting because you've got more than just one person's life," he says. "The concert is at the stadium, and that stadium has history. You've got to tip your hat to the stadium."


"One Nose Job Is Enough Plastic Surgery For Alexa Ray Joel"
By: Rennie Dyball & Liza Hamm
(April 28th, 2010)

Alexa Ray Joel is turning over a new leaf. Hospitalized after taking Traumeel, a homeopathic medication, in December, Alexa Ray tells People she's feeling much better - inside and out. The 24 year-old singer underwent rhinoplasty earlier this month, and says she's overjoyed by the results. "I was thinking about getting this for years," says Joel. Her nose, she adds, "always bothered me a little bit. I was self-conscious of pictures taken from the side. To some people that's vain, but at the end of the day, we all want to feel pretty." But the daughter of Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley says she's done with plastic surgery. Says Joel, "Would I do anything else to my body? No. It's not ten procedures like Heidi Montag. For me, that's a little extreme, but to each her own." As for the timing of the surgery - just four months after her overdose scare following a break-up - Joel says this was the right time for her. "Would it have been smart to get this procedure last year?" she asks. "No. I didn't know who I was." And now? "I feel really good."


"Review: 'Last Play at Shea'"
By: Dana Brand
(April 28th, 2010)

Last night (Sunday, April 25th, 2010), I went to see the world premiere of "The Last Play at Shea" at the Tribeca Film Festival. I don't normally like to write a review of a film until I have seen it more than once, taking notes on it the second and third time. I'm breaking from my own tradition here because I want to get the word out about this film. It's extraordinary.

"Last Play at Shea," directed by Paul Crowder, is an unusual film, but it is so successful because it is so unusual. It focuses on the final concerts played at Shea Stadium on July 16th, 2008 and July 18th, 2008 by Billy Joel and the people he invited to play with him (notably Tony Bennett, Roger Daltrey, Steve Tyler, and Paul McCartney). The film includes extensive footage from these concerts and it captures the powerful emotional bond between the crowd and Joel and McCartney in particular. It is a great concert film, but Crowder has made it much more than a concert film. By interweaving the related stories of Billy Joel, Shea, the Mets, and New York over the past half century, Crowder turns the historic concert into a celebration of the way in which great art and championships aren't things from another world. They can rise up out of our midst, out of the imperfect and the unlikely. Shea Stadium, as the film makes clear, was a very ordinary and imperfect stadium. The Beatles when they started, were, as Joel mentions in the film, an ordinary group of British working class guys who at the time didn't fit anybody's idea of what pop stars were supposed to look and sound like. Billy Joel, as the film frankly illustrates, is himself ordinary, imperfect and even more unlikely than the Beatles. The Mets, Joel's favorite baseball team, were even worse than ordinary and imperfect. Yet Joel, the Beatles, and the Mets brought miracles to the kind of ordinary people who filled the stadium and made the upper deck shake. The last concert at Shea Stadium celebrated the way the miraculous can emerge from the ordinary. The film shows us the concert, and it enables us to realize and cherish what it meant.

One of the most impressing things about "The Last Play at Shea" is the way it tells its stories without getting confusing or bogged down. The editing and pacing are brisk. There is a constant sense of excitement, of being in a visually arresting moment that sounds great and is moving you forward. There is a crisp and effective use of interviews with a wide range of people. You hear from Paul McCartney, Roger Daltrey, Steve Tyler, Christie Brinkley, Alexa Ray Joel, some of Billy Joel's musical and business associates, Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, Keith Hernandez, Ralph Kiner, Tom Seaver, Mike Piazza, Pete Flynn, me, and Greg Prince. Clips from these interviews are embedded in spectacular original footage. You will enjoy the horrifying haircuts and raw talent of the early Joel, and you will feel as if you're onstage with The Beatles as they try to hear the music they're playing over the screams of the teenagers. You seem to be following Mookie Wilson's ball through Bill Buckner's legs. Footage of the actual concert is included throughout the film, and it is often used to illustrate subtly whatever the film happens to be developing at the point where it is introduced. At various times, amusing and creative animations explain relevant facts about the history of New York and the way in which Billy Joel's life and Shea Stadium's existence connect to it. The most significant unifying element in the film, however, is Billy Joel's own voice. In his interviews throughout the film, Joel comes across as being every bit as articulate and as approachable as you dream he might be. Joel has a proud yet bittersweet understanding of who he is and what he means to people. He is humbly amazed at people's love of him, at his own unlikely success and survival. At one point, he looks out at the 60,000 people in the stadium and wonders how he has been able to fill this grand space when he hasn't released an album with original material for 15 years. Very few superstars would be humble enough or honest enough to say this to so many people, or to allow it to be included in a film. But you get a sense that this is what Billy Joel is about. He's not going to lie about himself, just as it doesn't make sense to lie about the Mets or about the shortcomings of Shea stadium. In this moment, as in other important moments in this film, we have the sense that there's never anything intrinsically wrong with being honest or being limited. The Mets' triumphs after years of drought, like Joel's triumphs after years of struggle, show us that getting something means so much more when you never in a million years thought you were ever going to have it.

In "Last Play at Shea," the sublime ordinariness of Shea Stadium, the Mets, The Beatles, and Billy Joel, are also associated with the city in which they have all come together. "The Last Play at Shea" is very much a New York story, but it is not the story that the Yankees or Wall Street would tell us. It's not about being king of the hill or top of the heap. It is also not just about Manhattan. Rather it is a kind of celebration of Queens and Long Island, of the vast, often boring sprawl of the whole metropolis, an enormous place that, like Shea Stadium, can be gritty and not always presentable, a place that has had its ups and downs. Like Shea Stadium, however, the New York celebrated in this film can inspire the kind of intense loyalty Joel and millions of others feel for it. It also has a tradition of inspiring a hopefulness that will every once in a while call a miracle down from the sky. This metaphor is movingly developed in the climactic sequence of the film, where Joel appears, at the end of the concert on the 18th, to be calling a star, an airplane from London containing Paul McCartney, down to earth. McCartney lands and in what any New Yorker will recognize as the greatest miracle in the film, makes it from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Shea Stadium in eleven minutes. It is exciting to follow his motorcade and it is moving to see him arrive. As ordinary as you could ever ask anyone to be, McCartney gets into the bullpen cart driven by groundskeeper Pete Flynn, who reminds him that he also drove The Beatles onto the field for the concert that created the stadium concert on August 15th, 1965. The story, and the cycle of miracles, come full circle as the film nears its end. As Billy Joel and Paul McCartney come together on stage, as 1965 and 2008 are connected, we feel that New York itself is about hope and loyalty, family and memory. It is about tolerating and transcending imperfection and failure. These are ideas I have always found in the great sixties myth of the Mets, something that you don't find in the myth of the Yankees, or in the minds of those who boo Mets players struggling to emerge from a slump. I am so glad somebody made a film about this other aspect of New York. It needs to have a voice and in this film we see how Billy Joel struggled to give it a voice in this last concert.

Paul McCartney's miraculous arrival prepares us for the full emotional experience of the last three numbers performed: "I Saw Her Standing There," "Piano Man," and "Let It Be." The audience for the film was as moved by these performances as the audience it was watching on the screen. In the camera's sweeping views of the crowd in the stadium, in the familiar music we were hearing performed by the men who created it, we were treated to a final revelation of the way in which extraordinary ordinary people create most of what there is to value in this world. Here is the true wonder and power of the great city. Here is the sense of community that made Shea Stadium into a cathedral of music and sport. I am so grateful that our local miracles have received such a worthy tribute from Billy Joel, Paul Crowder, and everyone else who had a role in making this generous, illuminating, and powerful film.


"John Lewis Advertisement Prompts iTunes Release of Billy Joel Cover"
(April 30th, 2010)

Billy Joel's hit "She's Always A Woman" could return to the charts after 33 years following its appearance in a television advertisement for British Retailer, John Lewis.

A version of the song by Fyfe Dangerfield, lead singer of cult band The Guillemots, is to be made available from iTunes after it was used in the £6 Million campaign to promote the store's "Never Knowingly Undersold" customer service promise.

The commercial was viewed 130,000 times in six days on YouTube.com, taking both the 29 year-old singer and the retail giant by surprise.

A spokeswoman for Birmingham-born Mr. Dangerfield said the number of requests for the track had been "phenomenal" and that managers had taken the decision to make it available for download through iTunes from Tuesday, May 4th, 2010.

She added: "It is being rush released on iTunes because of the demand and is being picked up on a daily basis by radio stations around the UK."

The 90-second advertisement, created by agency Adam & Eve, shows a woman going through stages of her life with John Lewis products.

Craig Inglis, director of marketing at John Lewis, said: "Whilst we expected the advertisement to have impact, we've been overwhelmed by the volume of responses and how deeply it has affected people. We have received numerous letters and emails."

The song is featured on Billy Joel's 1977 album, "The Stranger."

The advertisement also includes two members of John Lewis' staff, delivery drivers Brian Rees and Noel Breen, who are seen delivering a sofa to the main female character when she moves into her first home.