All Magic Sands/Chappaqua

June 15-17, 1965. Ornette Coleman’s trio record 80 minutes of new music for Conrad Rooks’ in-progress feature film Chappaqua, which will remain unused as the soundtrack. July 1965. Nashville TV bigwig Al Gannaway produces a 16mm Christian children’s adventure movie with the working title All Magic Sands.
The story centres on an orphaned quartet (boy, two girls, a baby) washed ashore on a desert island in what just might be the Bahamas. There, they encounter a pile of branches that transforms into a dubious Jesus-esque bearded man, as well as a doppelganger family of naked black children.
A failed epic that is equal parts semi-professional production and curiously cruel home movie, the original footage was left sitting untouched for many decades in a lab that went out of business. Made, conceived and executed at the same time, an unfinished film and a rejected soundtrack finally form a perfect match.