Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the 2003 comedy mockumentary about a folk music reunion concert, "A Mighty Wind".

It was directed by Christopher Guest from a screenplay co-written by Guest and Eugene Levy.

Both Guest and Levy also appear as part of an ensemble cast, which includes Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Catherine O'Hara, Jane Lynch, John Michael Higgins, Parker Posey, Fred Willard, Bob Balaban, and Ed Begley Jr. "A Mighty Wind" covers the two weeks leading up to a memorial reunion folk music concert following the death of manager Irving Steinbloom.

His fussy son, Jonathan, who has followed in his father's footsteps, works frantically to organize and stage the concert at the Town Hall in New York City with a live television simulcast on the Public Broadcasting Network.

The concert is to feature Irving Steinbloom's three most famous folk music groups, The Folksmen, The New Main Street Singers, and Mitch and Mickey.

The Folksmen are Alan Barrows, Jerry Palter, and Mark Shubb, a clean-cut folk trio that had a series of almost popular albums during the mid '60s.

The New Main Street Singers are a color-coordinated neuftet of nine cheerful men and women singing upbeat folk songs in close harmony accompanied by guitars, banjos, and string bass.

Mitch and Mickey were once the sweethearts of the folk world, partners on stage and in life whose biggest hit was "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow".

Unfortunately, they later went through a difficult professional and personal breakup that drove Mitch into a severe depression, and ultimately, a series of nervous breakdowns.

Although The New Main Street Singers have continued performing at amusement parks, The Folksmen haven't sung together since 1968.

And Mickey has settled down as the wife of a model train enthusiast who sells incontinence products.

As the different groups rehearse together in preparation for the Memorial concert, The Folksmen hope for a revival of their singing careers, while The New Main Street Singers want to make the move to bigger venues.

Mickey, meanwhile, must somehow work with Mitch while coping both with her own mixed emotions and Mitch's tenuous grasp on reality.

The revival of traditional and ethnic music, popularly known as folk music, began in America after the end of the Second World War.

It drew on the music of black artists like Josh White, Lead Belly, and Bessie Smith, and the sort of traditional music sung by Burl Ives, Jean Ritchie, and Woody Guthrie.

It's earliest stars were The Weavers, a male quartet that sang folk tunes, blues, gospels, ballads and children's songs.

They sold millions of records between 1948 and 1952 when its members fell afoul of the McCarthy hearings into communism in America.

In the mid '50s, folk music accompanied by acoustic guitars was a staple in such venues as coffee houses, college campuses, open air concerts, and folk music gatherings called hootenannies.

Although there was a traditional connection between folk music and left wing politics, and folk music was often part of the counterculture of the so-called beatniks, those popular groups were generally more clean-cut and politically neutral.

The Kingston Trio built their act primarily on traditional folk music and had a major hit with the folk murder ballad "Tom Dooley" in 1958.

The group's commercial success led to the popularity of other small groups, including the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Brothers Four, and Peter, Paul and Mary.

There are also larger harmony groups like The Limeliters and The New Christy Minstrels, as well as soloists like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan whose work was often more overtly political.

But in time, folk singers increasingly performed their own original works, beginning a new wave of acoustic music by singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, and Buffy Sainte-Marie.

After the 60s, traditional folk music once again became a specialized genre, although one whitened to include more diverse traditions and now often called roots music.

One of the people who helped to make folk music popular during the post-war era was Harold Leventhal.

Born in 1919 and originally a song plugger for Irving Berlin, Leventhal later managed folk artists like The Weavers, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Theodore Bikel, Joan Baez, and Arlo Guthrie.

He was the acknowledged inspiration for fictional folk impresario Irving Steinbloom whose memorial concert is at the center of "A Mighty Wind".

Although the term mockumentary only became popular in the mid '80s, the comedy pseudo documentary's been around almost as long as the documentary form itself.

The Beatles 1964 motion picture debut "A Hard Day's Night" was a fictional documentary supposedly about several typical days in the group's life as they traveled to London for a television appearance.

The pseudo documentary was also a common element of television sketch comedies like "Monty Python's Flying Circus", which parodied news reports about biker gangs with Hell's Grannys, an expose of roving gangs of delinquent old ladies.

Python alumnus Eric Idle was later a co-creator of "All You Need is Cash", his own pseudo documentary about a fab British foursome called The Rutles in 1978.

The mockumentary has now become such a well-established narrative form that the list of mockumentaries on the Wikipedia site runs to hundreds of entries of motion pictures, television series and specials, and even phony or, perhaps better, phonier reality shows.

The movie that really brought the mockumentary into public consciousness was the 1984 pseudo rockumentary "This is Spinal Tap" about a heavy metal group known as one of England's loudest bands.

"Spinal Tap" was directed by Rob Reiner who co-wrote the script with the actors playing the members of Spinal Tap, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, who appear in "A Mighty Wind" as The Folksmen.

Christopher Guest later made his own series of film mockumentaries.

Guest himself doesn't care for the term mockumentary, claiming his intention is not to mock anyone but to explore small, insular communities and the people who inhabit them.

His first was "Waiting for Guffman" in 1996, co-written with Eugene Levy, about a small town's production of a stage musical celebrating the town's history.

The cast included Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Fred Willard, Parker Posey, Michael Hitchcock, Bob Balaban, and Paul Dooley, all of whom would later appear in "A Mighty Wind".

Guest's next film "Best in Show", released in 2000, was about five dogs and their owners, trainers, and handlers as they converge in Philadelphia to compete in the Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show.

Eugene Levy was once again Guest's co-writer, and the cast memorably included Michael McKean, Jane Lynch, and Rita Coolidge, who also appear in "A Mighty Wind".

To create their films, Guest and Levy come up with a basic idea for each of the characters and a detailed outline of the plot but leave the dialogue and the working out of each situation to the actors, most of whom have a background in improvisational sketch comedy.

For "A Mighty Wind", Guest and the other members of the cast also wrote the songs.

These are not so much parodies as off kilter homages, retaining the sound and feel of the folk music of the '60s but giving them lyrics that don't quite make sense.

The inspiration for "A Mighty Wind" was a performance by McKean with cast members Guest and Shearer as The Folksmen went on Saturday Night Live soon after "This is Spinal Tap" was released.

McKean later said, "I came and hosted a show, and in lieu of another Tap piece, we did these guys."

The Folksmen later appeared in a 1992 television special "The Return of Spinal Tap".

The Folksmen would even open for Spinal Tap at live concerts.

They were often booed with the audience apparently not knowing or not caring that the performers were the same three guys they loved as Spinal Tap.

The original concept for "A Mighty Wind" was to provide a showcase for The Folksmen, but as Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy developed the idea, it became instead a somewhat loving tribute to the kind of folk music popular during their youth.

The emotional center of the film was now Mitch and Mickey, a folk song duo strongly reminiscent of Canadian folk artists Ian and Sylvia.

As critic Stephanie Zacharek put it in a review in "Salon", "Their characters, so wholly lived in, evoke something complicated in us.

We saw them not as silly old hippies stuck in the past but as acerbically nostalgic former lovers locked in separate compartments of the present.

Their banter is funny and strange and disconnected, sidestepping every obvious laugh and going instead for the most rueful ones, the ones that lurk deeper inside us and are harder to draw out, the kind of laughter that catches in your throat."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.