David Hemmings film of David Bowie concert tour to be seen at last

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Here's some good news from the Guardian. David Hemmings' film of David Bowie’s 1978 Isolar II tour will be seen next year, thanks to the present-day director Brett Morgen’s painstaking remastering of the footage.

As the paper explains: 

Bowie intended for the footage to be released as a concert film that could, according to his associates, play in nontraditional venues such as concert venues in lieu of him touring himself. After the Isolar II tour, Bowie would not tour again until the 1983 Serious Moonlight run.

But the always fast-evolving musician soon became busy with other projects: recording and releasing Lodger, working with John Cale on music that was never released and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).

While an acclaimed live album of the tour, Stage (recorded at US dates that spring), was released in autumn 1978, the footage never saw the light of day. 

"I simply didn't like the way it had been shot," Bowie said in 2000. "Now, of course, it looks pretty good and I would suspect that it would make it out some time in the future."

The photo above shows Hemmings on the set of Just a Gigolo with Kim Novak, Maria Schell and Bowie. This film proved a notorious flop and more or less put an end to his promising career as a director for the big screen.

As Hemmings later said of the Eighties: "People thought I was dead, but I was just directing The A-Team."

What we want now is to see his all-but-lost first film Running Scared (1972), which was shot largely on the Grand Union Canal at Braunston in Northamptonshire.