Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert really just wanted to make a rock ’n’ roll documentary.
In the 1960s, they began filming a London band that eventually became The Who. Before long, the pair of Brits were not only the band’s chroniclers but also its managers.
“The story of Kit and Chris and how they ended up managing and mentoring The Who is maybe the greatest untold story in rock,” said documentary filmmaker James D. Cooper, director of “Lambert & Stamp,” which opens Friday.
His first meetings with Mr. Stamp were focused on Mr. Stamp’s attempts to make a film about the late Who drummer Keith Moon, but the concept expanded during conversations about Mr. Stamp’s and Lambert’s early days with the British rock act — now embarking on its 50th anniversary tour.
Mr. Cooper spent a decade working on the film, which features interviews with Mr. Stamp and archival footage of Lambert, as well as early performances by The Who and fresh interviews with its surviving members — singer Roger Daltry and guitarist Pete Townshend. (Moon died in 1978, and bass player John Entwistle died in 2002.)
Mr. Stamp and Lambert could not have been more of an odd couple: Mr. Stamp was a working-class student with an artistic bent. Lambert came from an aristocratic family, was privately educated and was gay when such a thing was criminal. Lambert died in 1981 at age 45.
“In a weird way, they had very different backgrounds, but at the same time had very similar sorts of disposition,” Mr. Cooper said. “Chris struggled with the constraints of his working-class situation — rather bleak, East End, very tough working-class, kind of ghetto existence and a certain marginalization as a result of that very limited type of future.
“Kit Lambert [was] dragging around the ball and chain of a daunting aristocratic legacy,” he said. “It’s a different type of confinement and constriction, but confinement and constriction all the same. Also, Kit was gay, so both of these guys were outside the system. And I think if you’re an outsider due to very different circumstances, but the same feelings are there, perhaps it sparked a very deep connect.”
Mr. Cooper, a cinematographer by trade, said music was hugely important to him growing up in western Pennsylvania, where his influences included The Who.
“I have a visceral deep connection to music,” said the filmmaker, who plays guitar and has his own band.
Reviewing hours of footage that Mr. Stamp and Lambert had culled together was a mammoth task, but Mr. Cooper said he was able to fashion a narrative from the archives with the help of his crew and guidance from Mr. Stamp, Mr. Daltry and Mr. Townshend.
“It was amazing that they were filmed and photographed to the extent they were,” he said of his titular subjects. “It’s a matter of going through and finding what you need to serve the narrative but also has the right emotional content, the certain texture and feel and imagery from the ’60s.”
In a twist, Mr. Cooper said, Mr. Stamp told him that “Lambert & Stamp” was more or less the film that he and Lambert were trying to make when they first encountered The Who.
“They started out wanting to make this film, and they abandoned it,” Mr. Cooper said. “It was very clear that the film we were making was a continuation of that film that he and Kit had set out to make.”
One poignant scene shows Mr. Townshend and Mr. Daltry reuniting with Mr. Stamp, from whom they had been estranged for years, for the Kennedy Center Honors in 2008.
“I don’t know if it was as much putting it behind them as far as dealing with it as a reality,” Mr. Cooper said of the performers’ falling-out with their managers and the two surviving members hugging it out with Mr. Stamp at the Kennedy Center. “I think there’s being in the moment and being in the reality of the history and what it is.”
Asked about the state of contemporary music, Mr. Cooper opined: “I think it’s pretty much the same as it always is. All the mediocre stuff is prevalent, and all the great stuff you have to go looking for, but it’s out there. It seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Asked whether he ever took out his guitar to jam alongside Mr. Townshend or Mr. Daltry, Mr. Cooper laughed and said, “No, [but] I’ll try to do that at some point.”
• Eric Althoff can be reached at twt@washingtontimes.com.
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