The Eyes of Shannon Hoon: Danny Clinch on Using Found Footage to Craft a Documentary
“Originally we were planning on making a much more traditional film, which was going to focus on the members of Blind Melon in the present while they were looking for a new singer,” explains photographer Danny Clinch, as he details the origins of the documentary All I Can Say. However, the nature of the project shifted when Clinch received a box containing over 200 hours of Hi8 tapes filmed by late Blind Melon vocalist Shannon Hoon—some of which even included Clinch, who had befriended the group back in the day. That discovery prompted a reassessment of the project and ultimately led Clinch and his co-directors, Colleen Hennessy and Taryn Gould, to work with a fourth co-director, Shannon Hoon himself, in order to craft a film drawn exclusively from his footage.
All I Can Say tracks the final five years of the musician’s life. The singer passed away on Oct. 21, 1995 from a cocaine overdose. At that time, Hoon and his bandmates were in New Orleans on tour in support of their second record, Soup, the followup to the band’s self-titled 1992 record, which turned into a global sensation thanks to the song “No Rain” and its accompanying music video. The single’s success led to high-profile opening spots for The Rolling Stones and Neil Young as well as a notable slot at Woodstock ‘94. The film balances some bombastic moments with more intimate ones, including the birth of Hoon’s daughter Nico to girlfriend Lisa Crouse, just three months before his death.
All I Can Say premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and later screened at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, where Clinch was struck by the response: “We knew the fans would love it. But it also touched off an emotional reaction that I hadn’t quite anticipated from people with family members who had addiction and mental health issues or who had lost friends. There were lots of long hugs and people saying thank you. Then there were people asking about the editing and the way that the film was cut. It was a real conversation starter on all these different topics.”
Can you trace the origins of your Shannon Hoon project?
I had been friends with Shannon, the band and their families going back to the ‘90s. Colleen Hennessey, who is one of the co-directors, was aware of this. Colleen and I had worked on some projects back in the day and we bonded over our love of Blind Melon. At one point, she said to me: “If you ever do a Blind Melon project, let me know. I’m on board.”
So eventually, Colleen and I started to kick this project around. Blind Melon was looking for a singer and we said, “Let’s do a documentary on the band while they’re getting this new singer.” So we started filming and spending time with them. In the middle of all that, Lisa Crouse, who was Shannon’s partner—she’s Lisa Sinha now—and their daughter Nico offered us a big box of Hi8 digital tapes that I had seen Shannon shooting over the years. She said, “You know, these would be great for the project.” So we took the tapes, started looking through them and realized just how thorough he had been and what he was filming.
At that point, we brought Taryn on to do the editing. Taryn was not a Blind Melon fan but she was really intrigued by all this footage that we had and the possibility of doing something interesting with it. Taryn is an incredible editor and she’s a director herself. She and I have worked together on a lot of my favorite films—a lot of Pearl Jam stuff.
Taryn and Colleen then began the heavy lifting of going through all the tapes. They became really intrigued by it. At one point, one of the guys in the band, Brad [Smith], said, “Wow, you got all of Shannon’s tapes? Could you do it from his point of view?” And I was like, “That might be hard to do.”
But as we dove in and Taryn started experimenting, we realized how thorough Shannon had been. When you make a documentary film, you’re telling a story and if you leave our certain things the story will fall apart. He was so good at documenting the clock on the wall and what was playing on the television set—OJ Simpson, the Rodney King riots, Tonya Harding, MTV, all that stuff. So while you’re getting this insight into his life, time also becomes a character in the film.
However, there were still some holes in there until we got another box from Lisa and Nico containing 50 hours of answering-machine tapes. Shannon saved all of his answering-machine tapes. Some are just reminders about dentist appointments and friends calling to say, “Happy birthday.” But then you also have Mike McCready calling Shannon from rehab asking for some advice. Also, when he would do interviews, Shannon would tape them on his answering machine. That really filled in all these holes.
It’s that grounding in the historical context that makes it much more than a rock biography.
Absolutely. Although the music is a very big part of it, for me, it’s not a Blind Melon documentary. It’s really a film about a guy who was filming and self-documenting himself before everybody had a cell phone. He had to charge batteries; he had to have tapes. He had to store the tapes in a safe spot. He had to remember to bring the camera and turn it on, and he was just obsessed with it.
But there is another side to it as well. While he’s in the process of filming, he becomes famous. He sings on a Guns N’ Roses tune. [Axl Rose and Hoon both grew up in Lafayette, Ind., and the Guns N’ Roses frontman was friendly with Shannon’s sister Anna. Through this connection, Rose invited Shannon to the studio to sing backup on “Don’t Cry,” and Hoon later appeared in the video for the song, which yielded his first national exposure.] From there, he ends up having a hit [“No Rain”] and having a child. And then, before you know it, he passes away.
He happened to be in a band that had a No. 1 hit and, for better or for worse, was forced to go out and support it. But this is an interesting film regardless. It’s about time. It’s about mental health and addiction and all this other stuff, too. It’s about making the right choices and that life is short—you never know when your time is up.
The whole story is right there, and it was shot in such an interesting and unique way. At times, it’s really artful and impressionistic, so it’s almost like a typical rock-star story mixed with an experimental film. Somebody came up to me after one of the screenings and said, “Wow, it felt to me like I just watched someone’s life flash before their eyes,” which I thought was interesting.
It’s a filmmaker’s film too. The editing is so incredible and so unique. The fact that it’s all archival footage really is a feat. There aren’t a lot of films that are done entirely from archival footage. I mean, think of Amy, which is a great film, but there’s a lot of people looking back and talking about her in there as well. We have none of that in our film.
How challenging was it to show Shannon’s struggle with addiction through his own footage?
We had enough footage to present the darker side without allowing it to become gratuitous. There’s him smoking crack with his friends on the mountainside. There’s him scoring smack. There’s him being totally fucked up and addressing the camera. There’s a scene where he’s in a hotel room and he feels paranoid, and you realize that drug addiction isn’t glamorous. Heroin and crack and cocaine they’re just not glamorous.
It’s a very frank portrait of him. He did drugs, he drank, he got arrested, he took his clothes off. He liked to poke at people. He was sneaky, he was funny, all that stuff— and it’s all in there. He loved really hard and he played really hard, and he was loved back.
Another thing I often consider, when I’m talking about the film, is that people might wonder, “What was the band thinking? How did they let this happen?” But 28-yearolds—especially men, who often don’t mature as quickly as young women—are still out running around, doing whatever they want. All these guys had to do was show up for two hours onstage.
It’s too bad because I did spend time with Shannon, and we talked about how he wanted to be there for his daughter. He wrote the song “New Life” and he felt passionate about being a father. I spent a lot of time with him. He and I bonded when he went to rehab because I was always pretty honest with people and I was always there for him. I wrote to him and we talked on the phone, and he kept assuring me that he was gonna dial it back for his daughter. But it just takes one time to get distracted.
There’s that moment after Kurt Cobain takes his own life, when Shannon speaks about Kurt’s daughter Frances Bean, which is quite poignant given what’s to come.
I happened to be with Shannon when he heard the news. We were walking from their hotel room to the Letterman show when two young girls came up to us and said, “Oh my goodness, it’s such a sad day for music.” And, Shannon was like, “What do you mean?” And they said, “Kurt Cobain just killed himself.” We were walking through Union Square at the time.
Shannon was a really emotional guy and he was just crushed by it. I don’t know if you remember the show, but he drew a question mark on his forehead and dedicated their performance to Kurt.
Did you ever talk him about what he was hoping to accomplish by filming everything the way he did?
There’s that great moment in the beginning of the film where he basically says, “I’m doing all this filming because everything’s happening so fast. I want to capture it and be able to look back on it when I don’t remember what I did.” But on the other hand, there’s another moment where he mentioned that the music industry was eating him up and that, at some point in his life, he was hoping to maybe get into film and filmmaking. I thought that was interesting.
I especially think about Dave Grohl and what he’s done—the opportunities that you get and the connections that come from being a musician and a rock star. Dave Grohl has really used it to his advantage and made some great films.
Shannon’s partner Lisa told me he that he had organized and labeled all his tapes. He was very careful with them, and he basically said, “If anything happens to me, I want you to give these tapes to Danny.”
What was your reaction the first time you saw yourself on one of the tapes?
I mean, I have my Leica on my shoulder and I am playing harmonica. It was really fun. There was a lot of stuff that we couldn’t fit into the film. For instance, he filmed us all just sitting around waiting for a flight to Europe. At one point, Shannon says, sort of casually, “OK, we’re going to board soon. Has everybody got their passport?” I should have thought, “Why is Shannon asking for the passports? He doesn’t coordinate anything.” But then I feel my jacket. I’m not looking at Shannon, I’m just kind of tapping. Then, I look down at the seat and I realize that my passport is missing. But as I’m looking around, I notice Shannon across the aisle and he’s got my passport. He’s got that fisheye lens and half of it is on my passport and the other half is on me looking for my passport.
You mentioned that Europe tour and the Letterman appearance. I imagine that some people might not be aware of how big Blind Melon had become by the summer of 1993, when they spent time on an extended amphitheater run opening for Neil Young.
They got signed on four shitty demos. Fortunately, they had the talent to back up the gold rush of people trying to sign the next Nirvana, and they ended up being able to do it. I should point out that, to this day, the band is still out playing and Christopher Thorn and Rogers Stevens’ dueling guitars are still a really cool combination. They weave in and out of each other and are so completely different. At any moment, one plays rhythm, one plays lead, and then they go back and forth. Glen [Graham] is a great drummer and what they’re doing is interesting. They’ve grown and they’ve put out some new music recently that’s as strong as ever. I’m disappointed they weren’t able to cultivate that with Shannon and just keep building and experimenting.
In my opinion, their Soup record is really great. It’s completely underrated. Part of their downfall was the fact that Rolling Stone only gave Soup a star and a half review. And as Shannon said, after that, all the journalists didn’t want to talk to them because Rolling Stone said the record sucked. But I think it was misunderstood. Andy Wallace produced it and it’s not a grunge record, it’s a psychedelic Southern-rock experimental thing. It doesn’t sound like a ‘90s record—it’s not dated—and I hope that people rediscover it.
You launched a successful Kickstarter campaign that funded the project in 2015. Then it took a few years to complete the film before your premiered it at Tribeca. What were some of the obstacles you faced in finishing it?
We raised more than $100,000 and, to anybody who has never made a film, that number could sound outrageous. People would say, “You can’t make a film for a hundred thousand dollars? What did you guys do with all this money?” A couple people pointed out that we could have bought his mother, Nel Hoon, a house with the money. But the fact is that only got us through our first round of editing—renting a place to edit, paying the editors, all that stuff. That doesn’t even get you to music publishing, and then there are masters. There’s also TV rights if you show something that appeared on TV. So it was a combination of all of those things.
And then, folks really don’t have any idea of what finishing costs are. For example, you have to pay a lawyer to watch the film and to pick out anything that could be a potential lawsuit. Then you have to mix the sound for something that was filmed on a Hi8 camera. You also have to color correct. You have to do titles and all this other stuff.
The funny thing is that, two years ago, we were picked for the Tribeca Film Festival. We were like, “Holy cow, we got in!” We thought that it would be great for the film but it’s still just coming out now. The reason is that, after we got in, we found out about all this legal stuff that still needed to be sorted. And all the music rights needed to be paid for.
So we got into Tribeca and then we found out that we needed another $75,000 to finish the rights only for festivals, not even for YouTube, Netflix and worldwide. It went down to the wire but, finally, I found somebody who said, “I believe in your project, and I’m going to give you this money so that you can you can get it done.”
Now that you’ve shared All I Can Say with the world, what has been the most surprising or gratifying feedback you’ve received so far?
Colleen, Taryn and I took the film to Lafayette where Shannon’s sister Anna, Nico and Lisa all live. We offered to show the film to Shannon’s parents as well, but they were not ready to see it. I’m not sure if they have seen it yet. But we brought the film ourselves to show them.
It was gratifying that they didn’t ask us to change a single thing—not that we had indicated we would. Lisa allowed us to show her giving birth to her daughter. She didn’t say, “Oh, I’m not comfortable with that. Maybe you could just cut that that scene?” I love that there’s a nurse standing in front of the camera and Shannon’s off helping coach Lisa and get her through it, doing his part as a dad. Then he looks over and he sees the nurse in front of the camera, goes over and slides her to the side so that she’s not in the way.
The whole experience of bringing the film to them was really emotional. For instance, I think Shannon’s sister Anna had been harboring some feelings of guilt about what she could have done differently. But I think she realized that nothing was going to get in the way of what had happened. I don’t want to speak for her but it seemed, to me, like she had some sort of closure in a way that helped her, although it made her sad as well.
And then, of course, there was Nico. She never got to know her dad. You can watch as much as you want on YouTube and on MTV, but you’re not going to get the intimate version of Shannon he gives us in this film. And it was so gratifying to sit there with Nico. It was emotional. We were all crying and, at the end of the film, she stood up and hugged us all and said, “I’m so grateful to spend time with my father. This is such a great gift to me.” So the real reward for me was the gift to Nico.
