200 Motels

200 Motels is a 1971 AmericanBritish musical surrealist film cowritten and directed by Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer and starring The Mothers of Invention, Theodore Bikel and Ringo Starr. A soundtrack album was released in the same year, with a slightly different selection of music. In 2009, 200 Motels was restored with an audio commentary by Tony Palmer and is currently available on an Englandsourced forretail DVD.

In 1970, Frank Zappa formed a new version of The Mothers of Invention which included British drummer Aynsley Dunbar, jazz keyboardist George Duke, Ian Underwood, Jeff Simmons bass, rhythm guitar, and three members of The Turtles bass player Jim Pons, and singers Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, who, due to persistent legal and contractual problems, adopted the stage name The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie, or Flo amp Eddie.Zappa began writing a film for his new lineup called 200 Motels, and the band debuted on Zappas next solo album Chungas Revenge 1970, which was produced as a preview of the film. Zappa also met conductor Zubin Mehta. They arranged a May 1970 concert where Mehta conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic augmented by a rock band. This material served as a second preview of the film. According to Zappa, the music was mostly written in motel rooms while on tour with The Mothers of Invention. Some of it was later featured in 200 Motels. Although the concert was a success, Zappas experience working with a symphony orchestra was not a happy one. His dissatisfaction became a recurring theme throughout his career he often felt that the quality of performance of his material delivered by orchestras was not commensurate with the money he spent on orchestral concerts and recordings. ........

Source: Wikipedia