The footage was deemed too grainy, but as the band became more successful, so did the historic value of the film, eventually being aired on Granada's Scene at 6.30 in November 1963, and being a much repeated clip ever since.
Fontaine amassed a significant body of films on contemporary jazz, including on Ornette Coleman (1966), Sonny Rollins (1968), Betty Carter and Art Blakey (1986/1987).
[6] Among the wide range of subjects he profiled in film are figures such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer and Jean Shrimpton, Black Panther George Jackson, as well as many musicians: Kathleen Battle, John Cage, Johnny Rotten, and others.
[8] Together with his wife, the African-American actress Pat Hartley (who appeared in several Andy Warhol films, as well as Rainbow Bridge and Absolute Beginners), he co-founded Grapevine Productions in order to produce their work, including feature-length documentaries I Heard it Through the Grapevine (1982), in which writer James Baldwin revisits the deep south to reexamine the scenes of civil rights strife in the 1960s, and Art Blakey: The Jazz Messenger (1989).
[10] In 1993, Fontaine started a film production course at New York's School of Visual Arts, and from 1996 to 2012 he ran the Documentary Department at the postgraduate National Film and Television School (NFTS), where graduates he worked with included Nick Broomfield, Kim Longinotto, as well as a younger generation of documentarists such as Simon Chambers, Sandhya Suri, Daniel Vernon, Sam Blair and George Amponsah.