‘Murder in the Front Row’ is streaming now, bonus footage available

“I like to say this is not a Metallica movie, it’s a movie with Metallica in it,” he said. “And it’s difficult, I’ll tell you, because Metallica, first of all, they’re really good on camera at this point. They’re really good. And they’re charismatic. So there’s a natural tendency to want to lean on them, but I can just say I didn’t want to make the film featuring them more than everybody.

“But then you start to go into it and we approached it like this: there was a time when everybody was equal. When James Hetfield was just an 18-year-old kid, just like the kids listening to him who were maybe his age or a little younger, and that’s the time I wanted to get to and bring everybody back to the interviews which we did by showing them the old photographs and stuff like that. At that moment in time, that’s really cool to capture.”

Although you can’t ignore Metallica’s impact, Murder in the Front Row takes great pains to not ignore anyone else.

“I wanted to express that Metallica were just part of that but then you have these great other stories,” Dubin said. “Quite frankly, a whole movie could be done about Testament and it would be a great movie. And certainly Exodus is still really an amazing story. I like to point out that before Lars and James ever came to town there was Kirk with his own band that he put together called Exodus that was playing thrash music.”

Bay Area thrash metal documentary Murder In The Front Row screened around the country last year, and as of today it's officially out on DVD and streaming. (That's an excerpt of Invisible Oranges' interview with director Adam Dubin above.) You can rent it on Vimeo for 24 hours for $3.99, or purchase it for $10.99. It's on iTunes too.

There's also a deluxe edition DVD with 90 minutes of bonus footage and 16 minutes of that premiered online via Consequence of Sound. Watch below.