EXCLUSIVE: Netflix has set a January 29 streaming premiere date for The Greatest Night in Pop, a feature doc just announced as world premiering at the Sundance Film Festival on the 19th of this month.
Directed by award winner Bao Nguyen (Be Water), the film takes viewers back to January 25, 1985, when dozens of the biggest names in music convened at a Los Angeles studio and checked their egos at the door amidst the recording of a song to benefit African famine relief — one that would alter global pop culture history. Chronicled in the doc is the massive undertaking to assemble the world’s most impressive supergroup in a time before cell phones and email. That group of artists, led by the song’s co-writers and two of the most significant musicians of the 20th century — Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie — came from different worlds but united to record “We Are the World.”
Featuring never-before-seen footage, the film details the early planning stages, including the writing sessions with Richie and Jackson, and goes inside the famed Henson Studios where “We Are the World” was recorded. Joining other musicians, engineers and production crew in reminiscing about one of the most storied nights in music history are many of the artists who were there that legendary evening — among them, Richie, Bruce Springsteen, Smokey Robinson, Cyndi Lauper, Kenny Loggins, Dionne Warwick, and Huey Lewis.
The Greatest Night in Pop is produced by Julia Nottingham, Richie, Bruce Eskowitz, Larry Klein, Harriet Sternberg, and George Hencken. The executive producers are Angus Wall, Amit Dey, and Becky Read. Selling the film to Netflix was Paramount’s Republic Pictures.
Best known for his ESPN 30 for 30 doc Be Water on iconic actor and martial artist Bruce Lee, which likewise bowed at Sundance before going on to secure a Critics’ Choice Documentary Award nomination, Nguyen previously helmed the SNL doc Live from New York!. The Vietnamese American filmmaker has also previously lent his talents to the Vice News series Open Secrets, among other projects.
Other Netflix films bound for Sundance include Richard Linklater’s action comedy Hit Man, starring Glen Powell and Adria Arjona, which world premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, as well as Power, a documentary from Academy Award-nominated Strong Island filmmaker Yance Ford, looking at the history of American policing. While neither title has an official release date, the former is confirmed to be bowing on the streamer this year.