There are many different approaches to making a tour film that captures the life of musicians on the road. Perhaps you focus on the highs of performance or the boredom of traveling, the anonymous backstage rooms and endless planes, buses and hotel rooms. But what if you made all of that seem really fun?<\/p>\n
Directed by Tamra Davis, \u201cThe Best Summer,\u201d which debuts at Sundance tonight in the Midnight section, is rooted in a box of videotapes that the filmmaker found early last year while evacuating from the fires near her longtime family home in Malibu. Though they are now separated, Davis still shares the compound with Michael Diamond, better known as Mike D of the group Beastie Boys<\/a>. On those tapes was footage Davis shot in late 1995 and early 1996 as the band toured through Australia and Asia, sharing bills with the likes of Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Pavement, Beck, Rancid, the Amps and Bikini Kill.<\/p>\n \u201cI just always had a camera in my hands,\u201d Davis, 64, said in an interview conducted earlier this week. \u201cI identify as a filmmaker. This is normal for me to have a camera in my hand. People don\u2019t think twice about it. It\u2019s so unobtrusive.\u201d<\/p>\n A few days before Davis would drive to Park City, Utah, with her friend, neighbor and co-producer Shelby Meade, the two were sitting on the backyard patio of Davis\u2019 Malibu home (it survived the fires just fine) as a couple of dogs ran around the yard. When she spots a hawk flying overhead, Davis calls for one of her two sons to be sure to round up the few chickens roaming around.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Best Summer\u201d brings a blast of \u201990s nostalgia to the festival. Bikini Kill\u2019s Kathleen Hanna<\/a> and Sonic Youth\u2019s Kim Gordon<\/a> are both expected to attend the screening as well.<\/p>\n A throughline for the movie is Davis and Hanna interviewing members of the bands, asking them a standard series of questions including their favorite color, what they\u2019re reading and what their personal motto is before Hanna gets into trickier concepts about performance and persona, seemingly figuring those things out for herself in real time.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Mike, I filmed so much \u2014 every time I went out on the road with them,\u201d says Davis. \u201cSo I had tons of Beastie Boys stuff. I didn\u2019t know I had all of that other stuff. I filmed Foo Fighters and Beck and Pavement, I didn\u2019t know I filmed any of that. I looked at it and I see, oh my gosh, I\u2019m so diligent: Oh, I better get Pavement. Check.\u201d<\/p>\n At the time of the tour, Davis had recently finished directing \u201cBilly Madison,\u201d which launched the movie career of Adam Sandler. Having made music videos for countless bands, including many on the tour, Davis had also directed Drew Barrymore in the 1992 noir remake \u201cGuncrazy\u201d and Chris Rock in the rap mockumentary \u201cCB4.\u201d She would go on to direct Dave Chappelle in \u201cHalf Baked\u201d and Britney Spears in \u201cCrossroads,\u201d as well as work extensively on documentaries, including \u201cJean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child,\u201d which played Sundance in 2010.<\/p>\n Mike D, left, MCA and Ad-Rock of Beastie Boys as seen in the documentary \u201cThe Best Summer,\u201d premiering at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.<\/p>\n (Tamra Davis)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n At the time of the Australian tour in \u201cThe Best Summer,\u201d Davis and Diamond were newly married and there is a honeymoon vibe of sunny sweetness to the proceedings. The bands play for sprawling crowds in between lots of playful hangout time.<\/p>\n It was though manager John Silva, who works with a number of the bands in the movie, that Davis was able to start the process of getting permissions and untangling the tricky issues of music rights. She had to show each individual band the movie in order to get their approval.<\/p>\n \u201cThe only people I wanted notes from was the bands,\u201d Davis says. \u201cI work all the time with Netflix, Paramount, whatever, like all those things. I can\u2019t get that note and then translate it to the band. But if Adam [Horovitz of the Beastie Boys] had a note or if Kim [Gordon of Sonic Youth] had a note, I would do those notes. And I felt so proud to do their note and be like, \u2018Done, you\u2019ve got that.\u2019 That\u2019s why I wanted to make sure it was self-funded because I could control it like that. It could just be between me and the artist. It\u2019s just me doing the end credits.\u201d<\/p>\n Working with editor Jessica Hernandez, Davis wanted to keep the loose feel of the original footage, including how she often would shoot entire songs in a single take, her camera moving from one musician to the next as one might naturally look at them from the audience. The raw sound comes from the built-in microphone on her camera. Some additional post-production work had to be done on the interview footage, but the audio of the concert footage is, for the most part, she says, unaltered.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like watching a memory,\u201d said Davis. \u201cAnd for me especially, to watch it again was like a \u2018Black Mirror\u2019 episode of going back and somebody being like: This is what it looked like from your point of view at this time. That was your experience.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s something Davis has heard from other band members after showing them the film. \u201cAdam said it felt like I reached into his brain and pulled out that memory,\u201d she says. \u201cHe didn\u2019t realize there was somebody filming it. So to him he was like: How did you know that memory existed in my head?\u201d<\/p>\n Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail, Tamra Davis and Alfredo Ortiz in the documentary \u201cThe Best Summer.\u201d<\/p>\n (Mike Diamond)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n Davis had previously put Hanna in the Sonic Youth video for their 1994 song \u201cBull in the Heather\u201d as well as in a short film called \u201cNo Alternative Girls,\u201d so the two already knew each other. But they latched onto each other during the tour, taking on the informal project of the interviews and collecting candid and revealing moments with Gordon, Foo Fighters\u2019 Dave Grohl, Sonic Youth\u2019s Thurston Moore, Pavement\u2019s Stephen Malkmus and others.<\/p>\n \u201cIt became like that friendship that you have at summer camp,\u201d says Davis. \u201c[Hanna] goes, I was so glad that you and I had that same energy where we were just these girls going into people\u2019s dressing rooms, \u2018OK, we\u2019re here to interview you.\u2019 We were just bored. We were trying to get something to do.\u201d<\/p>\n It was Diamond who suggested to Davis that the end credits should say \u201cStarring Kathleen Hanna\u201d for the outsized role she has in the film. Another highlight of \u201cThe Best Summer\u201d is when Hanna interviews Horovitz. The two would marry in 2006, and their moments together in the film have the energy of a rom-com meet-cute.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s so bossy and she\u2019s really forward,\u201d said Davis. \u201cAnd I\u2019m pretty bossy too, but she\u2019s just like, \u2018Look, this is how it\u2019s gonna go.\u2019 And just her questions are so good. When I started to really put it together, I loved all of that. I think before I showed it to her, I texted her a couple times and I was like, \u2018Kathleen, I\u2019m making this movie and you\u2019re all over it.\u2019 And she was like, \u2018Am I going to be embarrassed?\u2019 And I\u2019m like, \u2018No, you\u2019re going to love this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth, as seen in the documentary \u201cThe Best Summer.\u201d<\/p>\n (Tamra Davis)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n One thing that jumps out watching the concert footage is the lack of cell phones, how the ubiquitous screens that one sees nowadays in the audience at shows did not yet exist.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there\u2019s an authenticity about it,\u201d Davis says. \u201cWhen I look at my female performers and the artists in this film, I love how they present themselves and how equal they seem with the men. I just feel that open acceptance of everybody. I know that my kids really like that world. When you see a whole video and they\u2019re not cutting, there\u2019s authenticity in that. Now we never have that experience of what that\u2019s like, to have that connection with the band \u2014 and they\u2019re connected to you as well.\u201d<\/p>\n With a few possible feature film projects percolating, Davis has been at work on a memoir, currently scheduled to come out next year, that includes anecdotes of when she went to Italy as a teenager and found herself watching Federico Fellini shoot \u201cCity of Women\u201d or hustled her way into shadowing Francis Ford Coppola as he made 1981\u2019s \u201cOne From the Heart.\u201d<\/p>\n As a woman working as a director in Hollywood in the 1990s, there were not a lot of choices presented to Davis and she often felt she had to make the most of whatever was available.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes people are like, oh my God, it\u2019s amazing you got to direct \u2018Billy Madison,\u2019 you got to direct Chris Rock in \u2018CB4\u2019 or \u2018Half-Baked\u2019 with Dave Chappelle. That\u2019s what I was offered,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThese were unknown comedians. They\u2019d never done a feature film. As a girl, that\u2019s what you get what\u2019s offered. But then how do you turn that into something special? I thought those guys were the funniest people I\u2019ve ever met in my life. So I direct like a fan.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a statement of purpose that\u2019s guided Davis even as she\u2019s ping-ponged between a huge amount of TV work, from \u201cP-Valley\u201d to the TV version of \u201cHigh School Musical.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cI become the best viewer for that show,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd so it\u2019s not me imposing my style on them. It\u2019s me appreciating how much I love that, what I\u2019m seeing in front of me. And trying to get that best version across.\u201d<\/p>\n Revisiting the \u201990s while making \u201cThe Best Summer\u201d has been a positive experience for Davis, one she hopes will resonate with others as well, not simply as a fun tour doc revisiting a very specific time, but also as a reminder the things can be small, personal and handmade.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m think it\u2019s exciting for young filmmakers to see that there\u2019s a film in the festival that\u2019s shot by one person,\u201d she says. \u201cIt makes you feel like you don\u2019t need to have a gigantic everything to make a movie. One person can make a film. I feel like that\u2019s inspiring.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then I\u2019m also excited as a woman of age that you can get a film into Sundance, that your career is not over,\u201d she adds. \u201cI always felt like, \u2018Oh, you\u2019re too young.\u2019 Then it\u2019s, \u2018You\u2019re too old.\u2019 It was never the right time for me. But I felt like it was my time, so you just had to keep doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are many different approaches to making a tour film that captures the life of musicians on the road. Perhaps you focus on the highs of performance or the boredom of traveling, the anonymous backstage rooms and endless planes, buses and hotel rooms. But what if you made all of that seem really fun? Directed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2249198,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2249197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/How-director-Tamra-Davis-found-The-Best-Summer-in-a.com2Fd72F442F8124050448689f22ca4e8206.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2249197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2249197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2249197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2249199,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2249197\/revisions\/2249199"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2249198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2249197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2249197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2249197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Several](\"https:\/\/ca-times.brightspotcdn.com\/dims4\/default\/8415f69\/2147483647\/strip\/true\/crop\/3200x1799+0+0\/resize\/320x180!\/format\/webp\/quality\/75\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F7d%2F5e%2Fd3e9bea6482590a014946a8ea920%2Fthe-best-summer-still-3.jpg)
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