Pulling together a wide-ranging documentary on the history of the musical festival Lilith Fair started with a single article. 

White Horse Pictures co-president Cassidy Hartmann recalls reading the 2019 Vanity Fair and Epic Magazine feature “Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair,” written by Jessica Hopper with Sasha Geffen and Jenn Pelly, and instantly seeing the potential for a film.

“[It was] a great underdog story that hadn’t been told,” she tells Playback Daily of the groundbreaking all-female music festival created by multi-platinum Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan in the late ’90s. “Also, the fact that everyone involved in Lilith Fair was fundamentally changed by it, the power of that experience for people really showed through in the interviews in that piece.”

Lilith Fair ran from 1997 to 1999 (followed by a one-off return in 2010) and featured dozens of female acts, including Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow, Sinead O’Connor, Erykah Badu, Paula Cole, Jewel, Mýa, Queen Latifah, Natalie Merchant, Indigo Girls, Emmylou Harris and newcomers Christina Aguilera and Nelly Furtado. 

Much has been written about the festival, and it was also the subject of the 1997 concert film Lilith Fair: A Celebration of Women in Music and the 2001 documentary Lilith on Top, which covered the 1999 tour. But Hartmann wanted to create a film version of the Vanity Fair/Epic article — a story told through today’s lens that would cover everything from the resistance the tour’s founders faced from industry naysayers and misogyny from the media, to the backstage and onstage camaraderie between the artists, to the festival’s instant, enormous success.

Directed by Ally Pankiw, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery is produced by Dan Levy’s Not A Real Production Company and Elevation Pictures for CBC and ABC News Studios, and presented by White Horse Pictures in association with Epic Magazine.

The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on Sept. 13 at Roy Thomson Hall, and can now be seen on CBC and CBC Gem. It premiered in the U.S. on Hulu and Disney+, and internationally on Disney+, on Sept. 21. 

The film made its U.S. theatrical premiere at a gala event at The Ford in L.A. on Sunday (Sept. 21), which was initially planned to include live musical performances. However, McLachlan announced on stage prior to the screening that the scheduled performers had collectively decided to not perform at the event “to stand in solidarity with free speech,” according to an article from The Hollywood Reporter. 

“I’ve grappled with being here tonight and around what to say about the present situation that we are all faced with: the stark contraction to the many advances we’ve made watching the insidious erosion of women’s rights, of trans and queer rights, the muzzling of free speech,” McLachlan said in prelude to the cancellation announcement.

While organizers had not stated which artists were scheduled to perform, The Hollywood Reporter claims that McLachlan and Jewel had been set to take the stage.

The event took place days after the Disney-owned network ABC took the late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air indefinitely due to his comments on the death of Republican activist Charlie Kirk. 

Financing and development 

White Horse’s Hartmann — whose L.A.-based company has produced music docs on The Beach Boys, the Bee Gees and Stax Records — partnered early on the project with Elevation Pictures, which became the lead producer in Canada because “there were a lot of Canadian elements to the story,” she says. 

The next step was approaching Lilith Fair mastermind McLachlan herself. “We started talking to her team first, and it became apparent that Epic had also been considering this idea,” says Hartmann, who pegs those meetings to 2020. As Epic held the IP to the article, “we wound up talking to them and, ultimately, decided to team up together.”

According to Hartmann, Elevation helped White Horse secure a “foundational piece of financing” with a commission from the CBC, as well as “soft money and funds that were really helpful as a foundation to then approach equity partners.” (Hartmann did not disclose the full amount of the budget.)

Hartmann says that Levy came on board the project via White Horse’s relationship with Epic and executive producer Arthur Spector, the company’s head of film and TV. She thinks Spector must have mentioned the project to Levy, who was enthusiastic to be involved. 

“I don’t want to speak for [Levy], but essentially [Lilith Fair] was the first safe space he found … growing up,” she says. “He was like, ‘I’ll sweep the floors for you; what do you need me to do on this project?'”

Levy, in turn, brought in Pankiw to direct after working with her on Schitt’s Creek and other projects.

“When Ally came on board, she had a very contemporary view of the story, as someone who was a little bit younger when Lilith happened,” says Hartmann. “We all wanted to tell the story of the festival, but in a character-driven way, not make a concert film. The other piece of it that appealed to everyone involved is this contemporary relevance. Unfortunately, these issues are still very much relevant now.” 

Hartmann admits she didn’t attend Lilith Fair when she was a high schooler in the late ’90s, and her reason underscores just how much the media at the time sought to portray Lilith Fair in a negative light (some appallingly sexist headlines are shown in the doc). 

“My relationship with [Lilith] is, unfortunately, similar to a lot of women who grew up in that time, which is I internalized a lot of the misogyny and sexism around the way it was talked about, and I remember it being made fun of,” she says. 

“It’s not necessarily why I didn’t go, but it might’ve been partly why I didn’t go. I don’t think I had any understanding of what it really was and what it would have felt like to be there, and so it’s definitely been an experience to look at it through new eyes, as an adult, the way that the media was in the late ’90s and just the culture in general.”

Once the team had their foundational partner in place with CBC, the rest of the financing came through from the Canada Media Fund and the Rogers Documentary Fund, as well as the Chicago Media Project, Minderoo Pictures, Carlene C. Laughlin, the Elfant Festa Family and Sobey Road Entertainment.

“We typically don’t start production until we’ve met the full strike price on our budgets so there was development that we had been doing, but we didn’t shoot interviews until we could actually raise the full financ[ing],” says Hartmann. 

 Production and post-production

With the financing and director secured and the creative direction in mind, the production team first interviewed the festival’s central figure, McLachlan, at her house in Vancouver in March 2023. From there, they spoke with the festival’s co-founders — McLachlan’s then-managers Terry McBride and Dan Fraser of Vancouver-based Nettwerk Music Group, and her then-agent Marty Diamond — and also determined which artists to reach out to, as they wanted to try and represent the breadth of performers who appeared at Lilith Fair.   

“A lot of these artists are busy, so we had to work around their schedules, and then, also, our budget — which was not unlimited — so we had to be strategic about who we were shooting and when,” says Hartmann. “We tried really hard to schedule multiple interviews at each shoot. I think in New York we shot five artists in one day, including Brandi Carlile, the Indigo Girls and I think Suzanne Vega. We got really lucky.”

The team had done a typical archival sweep to see what footage existed from the Lilith Fair tours, but one of the most fortuitous finds they made didn’t come until about halfway through production. It turned out that Lynne Stopkewich, the director of the earlier Lilith on Top doc, had shot over 600 tapes of raw footage for the film (mostly on mini DV and beta) with her collaborators Dean English and Jessica Fraser, which she gave the producers access to. (McLachlan’s former Nettwerk managers, who had commissioned the doc, had also saved some of the footage in a storage locker.)

“It had just been sitting there for 20 years and no one had seen most of that footage,” says Hartmann. “It was an amazing find … It’s what you dream of with these films, but it also required a tremendous amount of effort to secure the rights to use it, and then get the tapes transferred to digital, and then go through all the material and actually figure out how to incorporate it into the film.”

The doc’s biggest line item, however, was securing the rights for the music, which was undertaken by music supervisors Jody Colero and Amanda Clemens.

“We really wanted to transport the audience back into that moment and have it feel immersive, so it was important that we could get a lot of these big iconic songs,” says Hartmann. “At White Horse, we’ve done a number of films that have had this kind of a challenge, and we were able to be helpful in that regard.

“There was so much support again from the artist community for this project and so much love for Sarah. I think because of that we were able to get these artists and their labels on board for very reasonable rates.”

Sales and marketing

From the time CBC greenlit the project, the strategy included submitting the film to TIFF for consideration, with a plan for the network to closely follow the festival premiere with a streaming and broadcast window. 

“Building on the added profile and attention of a world-class film festival allowed CBC to maximize awareness for the film, and promote CBC as the home of buzzy, premium programs that are relevant in Canada and around the world,” says Maya Kane, CBC’s executive director, marketing and communications.

Hartmann says ABC News Studios expressed interest in the film halfway through production and then stayed in touch. “I had a relationship with [executive producer Claire Weinraub] and we continued to talk about it and give updates along the way. Once we had a cut that we thought was strong, [White Horse chairman and CEO] Nick Ferrall and I flew out to New York and screened the film for them. That was in the spring of this year.”

When ABC came on board as the U.S. broadcaster, CBC’s Kane says they brought their marketing teams together to “maximize budgets by sharing assets, such as key art and a trailer that could be adapted for both markets.” 

“By aligning the timing of our launch dates, it also helped with the consistency of our message to home audiences to watch now,” adds Kane.

CBC’s overall marketing strategy includes its broadcast, digital and social platforms, complemented by a digitally focused media investment. “This includes ads on both connected TV and YouTube platforms, as well as social content on Meta and TikTok in support of the trailer and specific clips, helping to bring our audiences to CBC Gem,” Kane says. “We are also cross-promoting extensively to CBC Music and CBC Docs audiences via their respective social channels and digital spaces to directly target these fan bases. 

“CBC also took advantage of the crowds downtown during TIFF, and the proximity of the CBC Toronto Broadcast Centre to the film-festival action, to cover a large part of the building facing Wellington St W. with the Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery key art, echoing the image used in the TIFF programme page and highlighting the CBC launch date.”

Image courtesy of CBC