MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: The Last Waltz needed a special effect to remove something possibly incriminating from Neil Young's nose in the film.

Since Thanksgiving is coming up, I thought it would be nice to a Thanksgiving-themed legend this week. So we'll take a look at a bizarre story involving Martin Scorsese's brilliant documentary, The Last Waltz, which was filmed on Thanksgiving back in 1976.

The concept of the film is that Robbie Robertson, the lead guitarist and primary songwriter of The Band, decided that he no longer wanted to tour. So he decided that they make a big deal out of their final live concert performance and so they got together their various big name friends from the music business and put on a special concert.

Robertson also decided to have it filmed and he convinced Martin Scorsese (who was in the middle of filming his own music-related film, New York, New York, at the time) to do it at the last minute.

The film was always been a bit of a source of contention between Robertson and the other members of The Band. First of all, the others didn't actually want to stop touring and sure enough, seven years later, they just decided to go on touring simply without Robertson. Plus, since Robertson was controlling the project, the others (especially Levon Helm, the drummer in the group and the lead singer on some of The Band's most famous songs, like "The Weight," "Up On Cripple Creek" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down) felt that it was all a bit of a Robertson vanity project. He was the guy who was friends with Scorsese after all (the two men would work together a lot after this film) and so they felt that it was little surprise that the movie tended to make Robertson look particularly good. Plus, Robertson had just recently produced Neil Diamond's then-new album and so Diamond was at the concert despite not knowing any of the other members of the band.

But anyhow, one of the performances in the concert was a brilliant job by Neil Young on the old Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tune, "Helpless"...

Young had done two long shows in Boston with Crazy Horse two days before flying cross country on Thanksgiving to do the film and it is possible that he used some pharmaceutical help in getting through it (Young has always danced to the beat of his own drum. He was once sued by his own label for his music not being commercial enough!). According to Levon Helm's biography, "He performed with a good-size rock of cocaine stuck in his nostril. Neil's manager saw this and said no way is Neil gonna be in a film like this. They had to go to special-effects people, who developed what they called a 'traveling booger matte' that sanitized Neil's nostril and put 'Helpless' into the movie."

The film's executive producer, Jonathan Taplin, told the exact same story in Peter Brunett's collection of Scorsese's interviews and I imagine that it was from Taplin that Helm got the story.

So yeah, special "booger" technology. Pretty hilarious.

The legend is..

STATUS: True

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