Zappa

Zappa is a documentary about the musician Frank Zappa, tracing his life and career through material drawn from his own private archive: video, photographs, audio recordings and writing, much of it digitised for the first time. The project was supported by a crowdfunding campaign backed by more than ten thousand fans. Alongside the archival material, the film includes interviews with people close to him, among them family members and figures from his professional circle, and touches on both his private life and his engagement with the politics of his time. Alex Winter directs.

Winter also produced the film with Glen Zipper and Ahmet Zappa. The credited cast runs to around a hundred people, most of them appearing as themselves, among them Frank Zappa through archive footage, former band member Mike Keneally, author and former GTOs member Pamela Des Barres, and members of Zappa's family. It was made on a budget of about one million US dollars and runs 129 minutes.

The film sits between Showbiz Kids and Adulthood in Winter's directing work, which also includes the documentaries Deep Web and the fiction features Freaked and the two Ben 10 television films. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.5 from roughly four thousand votes, while on TMDB it stands at 7.3 from fewer than a hundred, reflecting the much smaller audience recorded there.