Music Film Is Delayed by Fees for Songs

In the 1960s many of the hits coming out of Los Angeles under the names of the Beach Boys, Sonny & Cher, the Mamas and the Papas, the Monkees and other top pop acts were actually recorded by an elite but largely anonymous corps of studio musicians nicknamed the Wrecking Crew. To gain them some belated public recognition Denny Tedesco, a son of one of the most prolific of those session players, spent more than 15 years making a documentary about the ensemble. But there’s just one problem, and it has held up commercial release of “The Wrecking Crew” since 2008, when the documentary made its debut at the South by Southwest film festival. The film includes dozens of snippets from songs the Wrecking Crew played on, but the record companies that own the recordings want so much money from Tedesco, whose total budget was less than $1 million, that he has turned to a fund-raising campaign, including an event scheduled for New York in mid-June, to meet their demands. “There are 132 music cues in this film, and you’ll know 99.9 percent of them,” Tedesco, 51, said. “But when I asked one record company for a quote, they said it was going to cost $2.5 million.” He has managed to bargain the labels down, but, he added, “I’ve still got about 25 songs left to pay off and need to raise $175,000 before I start to see the light.”