A day with Frank Zappa (1971)

As Capt. Willard says: 'a real slice of life doc that gives you a genuine sense of what “a day with Frank Zappa” in 1971 might approximate. And… it’s not glamorous. There’s a lot of home/basement footage of Frank, as well as Gail, naked rug rats (Moon Unit & Dweezil, ages 4 & 2) and a handful of the characters that inhabited their world, including Miss Lucy (Zappa’s sometimes nanny & star of 200 Motels) of the G.T.O.’s, live footage of the Flo & Eddie version of The Mothers, and more. Frank pontificates on a wide array of topics, so casually diverse it even managed to surprise me a bit (having spoken with him myself on a half-dozen occasions), including his own infidelity on the road and how his wife deals with it. Something I’d never heard him really discuss. It’s all enjoyable because much of Frank’s pompous bitterness from his later years is absent here. His attitude is still Frank, however, and you really do get a feel for Grace Slick’s famed quote about Zappa being “the most intelligent asshole” she ever met'