Pass the Popcorn: Becoming Led Zeppelin

June 26th, 2025

What do you get when you combine the musical influences of Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Richard, British skiffle, and choir hymns?

I’m Christine Burright, a graduate of the UNO MFA in screenwriting program, filmmaker, and aspiring TV writer, for Pass the Popcorn for KVNO’s Arts Today.

If you guessed Led Zeppelin, then you’re right. You’re also perhaps a Led Zeppelin superfan. Or, like me, you’ve seen the documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin.

If you missed it in theaters and IMAX earlier this year, “Becoming Led Zeppelin” is now available to stream on Netflix, or to rent or buy on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.

This polished rock documentary naturally features extensive interviews from the three surviving original members of the band — Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones — as well as never-before-heard audio interviews with John Bonham.

I know you might be thinking, psychedelics, hard rock, the 1970s… I know what this documentary is about. But it’s not that. The film isn’t a look at the glitz, glam and stereotypical downfall of hard-partying rock stars.

Instead, it’s a look at the construction of the band’s songs and their individual development as songwriters, musicians, and studio producers. We see the foursome grow from charming British school boys in post-World War II England into, well, Led Zeppelin.

The film contains archival performances that display the true power they had as a live band. Some of the footage had never even been seen by the band members themselves and was shown to them for the first time during the documentary filming.

Many of Zeppelin’s most popular songs are included in the documentary in their entirety, along with live performance footage, so it’s not just a documentary about a band; it’s also a sort of career-overview rock show.

The band also shares a wealth of in-depth information, including details about the musicians and famous singers they collaborated with during their years as young studio musicians.

(I’ll go ahead and tell you right now that it’s pretty much everyone you could ever think of who stepped foot in London in the 1960s — minus The Beatles.)

They also go into great detail about their first album and how they intentionally designed it to be listened to in its two halves on American underground FM radio.

Since they were well-educated from their years spent in studios with other musicians, they owned the original recordings of their first record outright, so they had control over how it could and could not be released by their label, Atlantic Records.