Jimmy Page at Venice film fest to present Led Zeppelin doc

By NICOLE WINFIELD
Associated Press

VENICE, Italy (AP) — Guitarist Jimmy Page says he turned down a lot of “pretty miserable” pitches over the years to make a documentary about Led Zeppelin. But he says he finally bit when he received a deeply-researched proposal focusing almost exclusively on the music and chronicling the band’s birth in 1968 and its meteoric early rise. The result is “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” one of the most eagerly anticipated documentaries at the Venice Film Festival. It made its premiere Saturday with Page on the red carpet. Producers Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty obtained never-before-seen footage of some of the band’s early U.S. and British concerts. They also tracked down an astonishing audio interview that drummer John Bonham gave to an Australian journalist before he died in 1980.