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This Film Shows as part of the Celestial Cinema Thursday program, screening order for this program is as follows:

7:30 Special Musical Surprise
8:00pm Rock Prophecies
10:00pm Art Officially Favored
11:00pm Sita Sings the Blues

"What makes me happy is shooting guitar players." This comment, early in the film, comes not from a stalking psycho but from an earnest, seat-of-the-pants photographer named Robert Knight who now—age 60 or so—has amassed an archive of 200,000 candid photographs of the greatest rock and roll guitarists of the past four decades.

This film tells his story but it does much more than that. It takes you right into the presence—action footage!—of the guitar heroes you know and the guitar heroes you really ought to know. Robert Knight is cultivating a knack—call it karma—for shooting great guitarists and rock bands before they hit the heights.

For example, we get to go through the gates of the private estate of Jeff Beck. It's a royal estate fit for an Edwardian earl. We hang out with Beck and sort through his racks of well-worn guitars, pausing to contemplate the pink one into which Tina Turner once scratched her name with an ice pick at three in the morning. Beck says, "I always pretend that I've never played the guitar before. Every day I pick up the guitar as though I never touched one before."

Similarly we visit with Carlos Santana, who claims that he forgets how to play the guitar just about every five seconds. "I'll be standing there like a dork thinking where does this finger go‾" This film is an inspirational lesson in creative living. Santana says, "Don't give in to the thousand voices in your head telling you that you can't. Only listen to the one quiet one that leads you on." He says, "You've got to give yourself a chill, get a spiritual orgasm, make ugly faces…"

Juxtaposed, we experience Steve Vai in ecstatic performance, playing the strings with his tongue, knocking once to get the guitar to explode into cosmic ringing. He says, "Everybody has the potential to do something great in a creative field if they have the courage."

We see fascinating early images of Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, the Stones, Journey playing at the 1968 Crater Festival, Zappa, BB King, Clapton. We go with Slash back to his high school, Fairfax High, from which he was ejected 26 years previously for flipping a table onto a social studies teacher. Sitting on some stone steps, Slash gets so engrossed in noodling on the guitar that the cigarette in his mouth burns down to a four-inch-long ash.

Photographer Robert Knight was born in Honolulu. Picture a long-haired problematic teenager, son of fundamentalist Baptist parents, who took his camera into a 1968 Jimi Hendrix concert and faltered his way into a sort of career. He continues to shoot toward tomorrow's guitar greats. If you are unfamiliar with Panic at the Disco, The Sick Puppies, The B'z, or a dazzling Texas-born prodigy named Tyler Don Bryant, come to the show. Because you know who else will be there, probably wearing a beret and looking mildly insecure‾ Photographer Robert Knight.