A misplaced document shows how “A Star Is Born” producers got crowd scenes for the movie. They put on a dirt-cheap concert at Sun Devil Stadium
By Richard Ruelas, Arizona Republic
It was a festival concert with big name acts and dirt-cheap tickets. The only hitch: The show started at 7 a.m. And filming for a movie would mean the headliner wouldn’t finish until after 5 p.m.
It was a concert staged to serve as a backdrop for the 1976 film, “A Star Is Born,” starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. The script called for a packed venue, which meant producers had to figure out how to draw tens of thousands of people to Sun Devil Stadium.
Don Bolles was an investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic. In 1976, he was killed while pursuing a story. Join us for the journey and share what you remember about how the Arizona of Don Bolles’ era became the Arizona of today. Join the conversation on Facebook. And contact us here.
Their solution was a day-long concert headlined by Peter Frampton and Santana, with tickets selling for just $3.50. The schedule would block out two-hour windows in which the film crew would grab the shots it needed of Kristofferson and Streisand in front of the stadium crowd.
Some of the logistics for the day were spelled out in a document that was sent out to the crews for the bands involved. That document was discovered this month in a file cabinet of materials that had been padlocked shut and stored away in a warehouse.
