Lonely Boy
(Paul Anka)
Year: 1961
Language: English
Format: 16mm Black & White
Runtime: 27 min
Director:
Wolf Koenig,
Roman Kroitor
Producer:
Roman Kroitor
Executive Producer:
Tom Daly
Cinematographer:
Wolf Koenig
Editor:
John Spotton,
Guy Coté
Sound:
Marcel Carrière,
Ron Alexander
Cast:
Paul Anka
Production Company:
National Film Board of Canada
With an astounding eye for detail, directors Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor capture the minutia of the day-to-day life of teen heartthrob Paul Anka during the glory days of his early career — everything from his screaming adolescent fans to his sleazy managers.
Lonely Boy, a direct cinema documentary, was undoubtedly one of the greatest films from the NFB's Unit B. It represented a major development in the Candid Eye approach (from an emphasis on recording the external appearance of things to a more probing, quizzical style) while retaining the essentially humanistic world view of the Unit B filmmakers.
Profoundly anxious about the values of the modern world, nevertheless, Lonely Boy retains an element of faith (that Arthur Lipsett's contemporaneous Very Nice Very Nice mocks), which inevitably tends to portray "Paul Anka as a tragic figure" (Kroitor).
Lonely Boy won many awards including film of the year at the Canadian Film Awards.