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Artifact, or David against Goliath
Indie | Thursday 20th September 2012 | Osh
Jared Leto, lead singer of 30 seconds to Mars, directs a documentary which portrays the dispute between the band and the giant producer Virgin/EMI
The first thing that came to my mind when I heard that a reasonably popular band was putting on a fight with a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate, as EMI was, is that they must be kind of suicidal. But 30 seconds managed to survive to the $30 million breach of contract lawsuit that EMI put against them in 2008, for failing to deliver the third of five albums. That’s a lot of money! I can’t even imagine who can earn this amount of money with their music except Lady Gaga and maybe…no, just her. But luckily Leto is a creative man, and knows how to do different kinds of stuff. We knew about his acting career, but he also appears to be a doted director. He was filming a documentary about the band’s third LP when the conflict exploded: "It started as a film about the making of an album, and it became a film about the most brutal and challenging conflict of our lives", Leto told Rolling Stone Magazine, referring to the dispute which lasted over 200 days.
Artifact it’s not only a documentary about the recording of the album This is War, which is easy to guess where the title comes from, but a portray of the music industry and their tangled webs, as Leto says: "I hope that artists and audiences watch this film and get a greater understanding of how things work [in the record industry], because understanding is the beginning of change. Inevitably, we're all moving towards what I hope is a more transparent system". The documentary has been released recently at Toronto Film Festival, winning the Public’s Choice award, and has already received several offers from distributors. Luckily this story has a happy ending, and the band got a "more favorable" deal with EMI and will be able to release the documentary, but still owe the company 1.7 million dollars. Let’s see if the documentary can solve that…
By Laura Vila
