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hippie utopia. The point was not merely to “let the music speak for itself,” which seems to be the point of a typical rock concert film, but to show what this music—how it was performed and how it was received—revealed about the environment in which it was created and consumed.
    Some Kind of Monster allowed us to pay subtle tribute to the people who got us started in the business. Our film really is an homage to Gimme Shelter. Just as Gimme Shelter was originally intended to be just a document of the Stones’ 1969 American tour, Monster began as a simple making-of-an-album promo film. Like Gimme Shelter, Monster transcends its putative subject by providing a window into our times. As the critic Rob Nelson put it, Monster tackles “the incestuous relationship between psychology and creativity.” If Gimme Shelter is about the death of a mass movement’s communal dream, Monster is about struggling to maintain a similar dream within the microcosmic context of our families and loved ones. Put it this way: Can you imagine a film about a metal band undergoing group therapy appearing thirty years ago? Or even ten years ago?
    The structure of our film also pays tribute to Gimme Shelter. Monster telegraphs its ending and uses a flashback structure to take the viewer on an epic journey Gimme Shelter also begins where it ends, with Jagger and the Stones reviewing the Altamont footage in the Maysleses’ editing room. We know from the start that someone has been stabbed to death; the events leading up to the killing are shown in flashbacks. The late Charlotte Zwerin, the codirector and editor of the film (and Bruce’s mentor), brilliantly turned the voyeuristic gaze back on the subjects of the film themselves. At various points, the film returns to Jagger watching the Altamont footage on a Steenbeck editing table. Confronted with tragic images for which he is partially responsible, he struggles to formulate a response. With the camera on him, he can’t turn away. As Lars Ulrich would discover twenty years later, the camera makes you feel like you have to say something.
    I’m not saying that Some Kind of Monster is as important and groundbreaking as Gimme Shelter (though it’s been rewarding to hear some critics make the comparison without knowing of our connection to the Maysleses or our conscious attempt to emulate their film’s structure). Nor do I want to trivialize the Altamont tragedy by giving Metallica’s struggles the same symbolic weight as the murder that occurred right in front of the Stones’ stage and what that death said about the souring of the Woodstock generation. The point is, you don’t have to be a Stones fan to be moved by the Maysleses-Zwerin film, and I’d like to think you don’t have to like Metallica or metal to respond to the themes in Monster. You just have to be someone who’s ever tried to connect to those around you in a fractious world that does so much to tear us apart.

CHAPTER 3
    WEST MEMPHIS AND BEYOND

    Publicity still from Paradise Lost, the film that first introduced us to Metallica. For more information on the case, go to www.wm3.org . (Courtesy of HBO)
    If three kids hadn’t been railroaded by the American justice system, I probably never would have met Metallica.
    Once the whirlwind surrounding Brother’s Keeper died down, Bruce and I weren’t sure what to do next. In 1993, Shelia Nevins, the doyenne of documentaries at HBO and a fan of Brother’s Keeper, sent us a small wire-service story buried deep inside The New York Times. Three teenage boys had just been accused of murdering three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, a small town near the Tennessee border. The teens had reportedly committed the murders as some sort of horrific ritual sacrifice to Satan. Shelia suggested there could be a documentary here. If so, HBO might be interested.
    There was nothing in the article to suggest that the kids might have been wrongly accused. Their possible innocence