I’m getting sick of reading about how Martin Scorsese got his set list for the Stones show seconds before the concert started, in his “Shine a Light” concert film of the Stones. The latest is Anthony Lane in the New Yorker:

The film records a pair of concerts* that the band delivered, over two nights, at the Beacon Theatre in New York in 2006. For the first twenty minutes, we follow the anxious buildup, with shots of Scorsese asking, in kindly exasperation, whether he might possibly have a sneak preview of the playlist for the night. Someone finally hands him a crumpled copy, with about nine seconds to spare.

Here’s Scorsese, interviewed by an actual journalist:

Question: There’s a sequence in the beginning of Shine a Light in which you comically try to get a set list from the band so you can set up cameras. Was that really how it happened?

Answer: Let me put it this way, it might as well have been (laughter).

[…]

Q: Did you really get the list only as the show started?

A: It wasn’t exactly at that point. . . . That list was purloined; I use the word, by somebody, I can’t say who. But somebody got that list from (Mick Jagger’s) room, I don’t know how, three or four hours before.

Emphasis added. As you can see from this accounting of the band’s setlists over the past few years, virtually every one of the hundreds of shows they’ve played over the past few years began with either “Start Me Up” (with which the band opened the first of their two nights at the Beacon) or “Jumping Jack Flash” (with which they opened the second). The chances of Mick Jagger doing something spontaneous were accordingly close to nil. It’s a pretty lame beginning for the film in any case, part of a pattern of Scorsese losing his assurance in his most recent films, and it’s also dishonest, for a film that purports to be a documentary. But it’s a lot less interesting to say: “Jagger opened the show the way he always does, and in any case I had four hours before the show to prepare for it.”

* The film actually chronicles only the second of the two shows.