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One of the most surprising things about the Netflix trailer for Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” is its use of “Stairway to Heaven,” an eight-minute theme song from the 1971 album “Led Zeppelin IV.”
The band is very picky about who they choose to license their material to – and in particular, “Stairway to Heaven.” Big directors and big projects have tried many times and just as often failed to get the song for their film or television project.
Per Stereogum, Cameron Crowe had just written but filmed a scene for “Almost Famous” in which “Patrick Fugit’s William, trying to get his mother to let him follow the band Stillwater on the road for a Rolling Stone feature, plays his mother ‘Stairway,’ played by Frances McDormand, trying to use it to explain why music means so much to him. When the band was playing, Crowe cut the scene to completely
And last week, former “Simpsons” writer and executive producer Josh Weinstein mentioned to X how they had tried to license “Stairway to Heaven” for the classic Season 7 episode “Bart Sells His Soul.” It’s in the beginning, when Bart tricks the organist at the church into playing a funny song. It ended up being Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (perhaps memorably used at the end of Michael Mann’s “Manhunter”). But it was supposed to be “Stairway to Heaven.”
According to Weinstein, the band wanted too much money (understandably), but as he wrote on X, “Sometimes budget concerns lead to extra creativity! Accept that philosophy. He also said that the alternative song choice, from the American rock band’s 1968 album “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” was “much funnier”.
As the Stereogum article points out, “Stranger Things” also tried to license the song (again unsuccessfully). We think they settled for the Prince.
But perhaps the most striking use of the song occurred in “Wayne’s World,” Penelope Spheeris’ 1992 masterpiece with Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. There’s a joke when Wayne and Garth go to a music store and Wayne starts playing “Stairway to Heaven.” He is stopped by a clerk, who points to a sign that says, “No Stairway to Heaven.” rejected.”
Well, from 1992, when the film was first released on home video, until 2022, you couldn’t actually hear the opening chords from the song. As GQ put it in a 2017 piece (about “most complicated accidental gag”), “At some point after the US release, Warner Music Group and Led Zeppelin refused the rights to even the first few notes of ‘Stairway’ for broadcast, video, or foreign distribution, resulting in a rushed, inconsistent edit.”
That’s right – the whole joke of Wayne starting to play “Stairway to Heaven” was confusing him he wasn’t really playing “Stairway to Heaven.”
Spheeris told Billboard at the time, “With ‘Stairway to Heaven’ we were told we could only use two notes before we had to pay $100,000, so it’s a very hard sell that he’s going to play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in two notes. I don’t know if this is true, but someone told me that we had a couple of notes too many to go back in the first version of the movie.”
Finally, in 2022 (!) the cord was reinstated as part of the film’s 4K HD Blu-ray release (and subsequently updated on streaming/digital platforms). The national nightmare was long over. After some more money exchanges hands (we assume).
But how did Gerwig land “Stairway to Heaven” for the “Narnia” trailer anyway?
At an event in New York City to launch the trailer, she told moderator Stephen Colbert that she showed the film to Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, who were moved by her creation. “They saw the heart of the movie,” Gerwig told Colbert. “The whole thing was very lucky.”
She also said that the song represented “the story of the film,” saying that the pieces of art share the element of being a “spiritual quest.”
