Janis is a documentary film about the pioneering rock singer Janis Joplin released to theaters across the United States in the spring of 1975 (copyrighted in 1974).[1] It was available on videocassette in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, but DVD versions have been released only in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. An American basic cable channel showed it in 2007. The film was directed by Howard Alk with a lot of assistance from Albert Grossman, Janis' manager. The total running time is one hour and 36 minutes. Between Janis' 1970 death and the advent of home video in the 1980s, seeing this film in a theater was the only way for her fans to see her perform. Unlike more recent documentaries on rock stars, Janis doesn't feature any sound bite interviews with the subject's friends or business associates. All of the footage was made when the singer was alive. Janis supplies the little narration that viewers get. She is heard saying that when she was a teen-ager in Port Arthur, Texas, she was influenced by the singer Leadbelly. She says she is satisfied with Mr. Grossman as her manager. The movie includes a color videotaped segment from her June 25, 1970 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, footage from her Woodstock performance in 1969 (dancing with her band's saxophone player during an instrumental break), and another television segment videotaped in black & white in April of 1967 before she became famous. A lot of screen time is devoted to Janis' 1969 European tour, including an interview Janis gave in Stockholm and the ecstatic reaction of a clean-cut female fan in Munich when she sees Janis through the window of her tour bus before the concert starts. (The American fan, who reveals on camera that she is the wife of a U.S. Army officer stationed in Germany, is later seen with several German youths dancing on stage with Janis.) This footage illustrates the fact that stoned Americans were not the only people who enjoyed Janis' music when she was alive. Laura Joplin, the star's younger sister who decades later contributed to the hit off-Broadway play Love, Janis that was based on Laura's book of the same name, is seen and heard talking to Janis in footage of a ten-year reunion of Port Arthur's Thomas Jefferson High School, class of 1960.
