Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller invariably accomplish artful profiles of the luminaries of my generation. This go-round they aim their talents on Peter Asher—childhood actor turned teenage pop star turned music producer (kickstarting the careers of James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, for starters). Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher (2025) recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and is upcoming at the Mill Valley Film Festival where audiences will have two opportunities to be treated to the film’s imaginative and investigative strengths.
Whereas IMdb doesn’t bother to list Asher’s childhood acting credits, Everywhere Man situates the developmental importance of Asher’s early screen appearances, and the film’s coda over the closing credits is a hilarious non-sequitur that comes out of nowhere.
Goldfine and Geller elevate documentary filmmaking to artful storytelling. Two examples: after graphing out the association between Asher and Paul McCartney—who wrote “A World Without Love” for Asher when he teamed up with Gordon Waller as Peter and Gordon (it was their first hit)—the filmmaking team shows the scrap of paper on which McCartney drafted his chords and verses, and then lifts those lyrics in their original penmanship onto the demo reel of tape improvising the song’s first version. It’s a lovely moment that reflects the connective tissue that inflects creative manifestation.
Throughout the documentary Asher is interviewed against rear projections of various phases of his life, like pages out of a scrapbook. It articulates memory as being a powerful visual medium situated behind its subject, much as we generally think of the past as being behind us, but Goldfine and Geller stitch the past forward to the present, refuting the chance of memory being an unreliable narrator. The memories in Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher are rich, exact, and entertaining.
Everywhere Man screens Saturday, October 4, 2025 at 7:00PM and Tuesday, October 7, 2025 at 4:00PM. Both screenings are venued at Mill Valley’s Sequoia Theater.
