Local Family's Seven-Years-In-The-Making Gordon Lightfoot Movie To Screen In TC

Seven years ago, a Traverse City family embarked upon the quest of making a movie about Canadian folk music legend Gordon Lightfoot. Next week, that film will finally screen for Traverse City audiences, with a showing planned at the State Theatre for the evening of Tuesday, July 11. Beyond the more than half-a-decade journey to get the movie to screens, though, the film – called Lightheaded: A Gordon Lightfoot State of Mind – is the product of a lifetime passion for music that Traverse City’s own John Corcoran passed down to his kids and forged into a lasting friendship with Lightfoot himself.

“I’m about to turn 69, and it started when I was 17,” John says of his fandom for Lightfoot, a revered singer-songwriter known for tracks like “Sundown,” “If You Could Read My Mind,” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. “I was living in East Lansing, and I saw him for the first time at Michigan State, at the auditorium there. And then as the years went by, I got the opportunity to see him a bunch more times. My job was in the energy business and I worked all over the country, so I would keep tabs on [Gordon and the band] and see them whenever I could. In 1989, I got to know Gordon and his team, and they became comfortable enough with me that, when I would be around, they would leave me a ticket at the box office. That afforded me an opportunity to go see them a lot.”

All told, John saw Lightfoot perform upwards of 600 times before the songwriter passed away this past spring at the age of 84. As John got older and started a family, his fondness for Lightfoot and his music grew from a personal fascination to a family tradition. Two of the three Corcoran kids – Brady Corcoran, a local musician who also serves as the audio tech program coordinator at Northwestern Michigan College (NMC); and Baylee Kahlon, who now lives in Israel with her husband and two sons – ended up becoming such big Lightfoot fans themselves that they ultimately dreamed up (and co-directed) the Lightheaded film.

“When the kids were younger, they’d get in the car with me and travel to see Gordon play all over the place,” John recalls. “It became a family adventure. They literally grew up with Gordon’s music, and fell in love with it. And then our family became friends with Gord and the band and the crew.”

That family friendship meant it wasn’t such a leap when, in late 2015, Brady and Baylee – along with Baylee’s husband Moni – started kicking around the idea that became Lightheaded. At the time, Lightfoot was preparing to mount his first tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland in 30 years – a major milestone in the fan community, given that the Canadian superstar has a huge following in those parts of the world. Baylee and Brady already knew their dad was planning to head overseas to follow the tour; they decided to join him.

“Brady said, ‘Yeah, let’s go! We can take a GoPro and some recording equipment and do podcasts on the road,’” Baylee recalls. “And the idea ran from there.”

While Baylee and Brady both have backgrounds in music, dating back to heavy involvement in the music programs at Traverse City Central High School, neither had experience with filmmaking prior to hopping on an airplane in 2016 to follow Lightfoot and his band around the UK. Fortunately, they found valuable collaborators to help bring the project together.

“When I was in Israel, I met Noam Chojnowski, who was a student right out of film school, and he came on the tour with us,” Baylee says. “Now, he’s kind of booming in the Israeli cinematography world, but we got him when he was just starting out. There's no way that we could have done the movie and made it look like he did on our own. And then, our editor, Nadav Elovic, we also found him in Israel and he was at the very beginning of his career, too. So it was a ragtag crew, a ragtag production, and we all just grew together.”

Between concert footage, on-the-street interviews with UK Lightfoot fans, and other shots from the tour, the team ended up with “5-10 terabytes of footage,” per Brady, who posted up with Elovic at the NMC University Center to whittle those “hours and hours” of film into a 75-minute final cut.

The crown jewel of all the footage comes from an interview that Brady conducted with Lightfoot at the musician’s home in Canada in 2021. “Without that three hours at the Lightfoot house, the film would have seemed very dated,” Brady says. “[Getting that interview] made the movie more relevant to now, because we did it post-COVID and the tour was back in 2016. Getting to talk with Gordon and visit with him, it was incredibly beneficial for the film and put a bow on everything.”

The project culminated last year when the Lightheaded team pulled together a screening of the film in Toronto on St. Patrick’s Day. “We found an old art deco theater there in Toronto, and Gordon and the band came, and he sat right next to me during the movie,” John recalls. “And throughout the movie, he would reach over and grab my knee, and then he would grab a handkerchief and dab his eyes. Afterwards, Brady said, ‘Dad, I think we won: We got Gord to cry!’”

“I think the great thing is that [Lightfoot] got to see the film before he passed away,” John continues. “And I know he loved it, because we went the next day to his house, and his wife Kim made it clear how much the movie had meant to him and all of the band. So, it was a labor of love, no question about that.”

Now, the Corcorans will get to bring that labor of love to their hometown. On July 11, John says the family is “giving the movie to the community” with a free showing at the State Theatre. Doors open at 6pm, the movie starts at 7pm, and admission will be on a first come, first served basis. As of July 1, the film is also available for streaming on Amazon Prime.

For Baylee, who both John and Brady credit as the driving force that got the film across the finish line, the important thing to stress is that Lightheaded, while about Gordon Lightfoot, isn’t just a movie for Lightfoot fans.

“Music, for our family, has always been such a gift, and I think it’s the same for so many people,” Baylee tells The Ticker. “So the movie is about Gordon’s music, but also what music gives to people, and where it can take you, and what it can make you do. In the end, it’s not even necessarily about Lightfoot, but about how music touches your soul.”

Pictured: left, the Lighthearted poster; right, Nadav Elovic (editor) Noam Chojnowski (cinematographer), and Brady Corcoran and Baylee Kahlon (co-directors) at the Toronto premiere/private screening of the film on March 17, 2022.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story listed "Thursday, July 11" as the date of the screening. The film will show at the State Theatre on TUESDAY, July 11.