Jimmy Page at Venice film fest to present Led Zeppelin doc

Guitarist Jimmy Page says he turned down a lot of “pretty miserable” pitches over the years to make a documentary about Led Zeppelin

VENICE, Italy -- Guitarist Jimmy Page says he turned down a lot of “pretty miserable” pitches over the years to make a documentary about Led Zeppelin. But he finally bit when he received a deeply-researched proposal focusing almost exclusively on the music and chronicling the band’s birth in 1968 and its meteoric early rise. The result is “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” one of the most eagerly anticipated documentaries at the Venice Film Festival, which made its premiere Saturday with Page on the red carpet. Producers Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty — avowed Zeppelin fans — obtained never-before-seen footage of some of the band’s early U.S. and British concerts as well as an astonishing audio interview that drummer John Bonham gave to an Australian journalist before he died in 1980. The interview, concert footage and other archive material are spliced into contemporary interviews with the three surviving band members — Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones — to create a montage that maps the frenetic first two years of the band’s existence and its early musical influences.