Robert Schwartzman and Alex Ross Perry on making a documentary

“They’re not my favorite band,” filmmaker Alex Ross Perry says of indie rock band Pavement, the subject of his documentary. Sidewalks.

It’s not serious. The Stockton, Calif.-born band, which formed in 1989, was the type of group not necessarily found atop a stack of alternative rock CDs alongside the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Offspring, Garbage and President of the United States. And that’s because Pavement was a band that did things their own way at a time when bands that made it sold out…. Very often, a single music video (e.g. They Might Be Giants’ “Don’t Let’s Start”, Offspring’s “Come Out and Play”) was the defining moment for such great bands, catapulting them to greater fame and commercial success of over a million albums in the 90s.

Perry adds on today’s Crew Call what led him to spotlight Pavement: “This is my favorite era of cultural consumption of the way media was distributed, broadcast and marketed: indie label, mainstream label; sell yourself, don’t sell. And this is the band you can tell this story with, better than any other band. So the fact that they aren’t literally my favorite band of all time doesn’t matter because they are the absolute favorite band to tell the story I’ve been dying to tell.

Although their sound did not oppose the alternative bass of the time and their sound was not that far removed from that of Nirvana, Pavement were a band that stayed true to their own rhythm, stylistically and in terms of image.

“Beavis and Butthead definitely clowned around,” Perry said.

Here is our conversation with Perry and Sidewalks Robert Schwartzman, boss of the EP and Utopia:

There was a pivotal moment for the band (which has broken up and reunited myriad times) when guitarist Scott Kannberg was arguing with a band member at Lollapalooza ’95; his anger got the better of him and he ended up knocking the crowd over and making them laugh before Pavement had no choice but to leave the stage.

In telling the story of Pavement, Perry also decided to do it in a way rather than travel. sidewalks, which the executive producer of the documentary, Robert Schwartzman’s Utopia, released last summer, is both a music documentary and a satire. Archival footage and interviews with the band are mixed with a film-within-a-film in which actors play the band members (Joe Keery as Stephen Malkmus; Fred Hechinger as Bob Nastanovich; Natt Wolff as Scott Kannenberg) and Robert’s brother, Jason Schwartzman, as Chris Lombardi, founder of the group’s label Matador Records. The film used a form of touring distribution last summer with stops in several cities, becoming one of Utopia’s most successful films, grossing nearly $400,000 and attracting Gen Z and baby boomers.

Schwartzman also had his own traveling music documentary last summer, Clinging to a Dream: The Zombie Documentary, which brought the former Rooney lead singer on tour with 1960s English rock band “Time of the Season” to key movie theaters. Talking about taking independent documentaries to another level, Schwartzman says it’s about “exploring new tactics to engage audiences in these releases.”

“In today’s world, because there’s so much going on every day, you’re trying to keep up with people’s viewing habits. I think a music documentary is kind of perfect for a slower approach and to give it more time for discovery,” Schwartzman says.

“When a film is available digitally everywhere, I feel like some of the magic is lost at that point,” the EP continues. “The longer you can take before a film comes to digital, the more events there are, the more activations, the more moments you can create to engage people, the more people can come away with experiences that have some of that.”

Sidewalks is one of the documentaries eligible for the 98th Academy Awards.