On the night of December 14, 1971, a college student named Ed Mann sat down at WCWP, the campus radio station at C.W. Post in Brookville, and interviewed a 22-year-old piano player from Hicksville whose first album had just come out. The tape of that broadcast, a quarter-inch reel-to-reel master, then disappeared for more than half a century.

It has been found, and it has become a film. 1971: Billy Joel's Lost Interview will have its world premiere on Friday, September 25 at the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame in Stony Brook Village, where it opens the second annual LIMEHOF Music Documentary Film Festival. The premiere puts one of the earliest recorded conversations with Long Island's most famous musician back on Long Island soil, about ten miles from the North Shore hamlet that gave his debut album its name.

A voice from before the fame

The timing of the original broadcast is what makes the recording remarkable. In December 1971, Billy Joel was not yet Billy Joel. Cold Spring Harbor, his debut record, had arrived only weeks earlier, pressed at the wrong speed and selling modestly. Piano Man was two years away. The Stranger, the album that would make him a superstar, would not exist for another six years. The young man who sat for the WCWP interview was a working musician from Hicksville with a manager, a flawed first record and no guarantee of anything.

That manager, Irwin Mazur, was part of the conversation too, and both men appear in the film alongside Mann, who conducted the interview for a WCWP program called That's Interesting. Mann, the student behind the microphone that night, is now the film's executive producer.

How a lost tape became a movie

Director and producer Adam Ripp built the film around the recovered audio, using AI animation to visually recreate Joel, Mazur and Mann as they appeared in 1971. There is no surviving footage of the interview, so the technology does the work a camera never did: the film's visuals are a reconstruction, while every word is the original recording.

LIMEHOF executive director Tom Needham has framed the project as a case study in what the technology can do for music history when it is applied carefully, preserving a moment that would otherwise exist only as audio in an archive. Joel himself is a two-time LIMEHOF inductee, honored as a solo artist in 2006 and again in 2025 as a member of The Hassles, the Long Island band he played in before going solo.

The festival around it

The premiere opens a three-day festival, running September 25 through 27 at LIMEHOF's home at 97 Main Street in Stony Brook Village. The organization bills it as the first and largest festival dedicated entirely to music documentaries, and this year's edition will screen more than 40 short and feature-length films, with live performances, parties and question-and-answer sessions threaded between them.

For a Long Island music fan, the setting is part of the draw. LIMEHOF's building sits in the middle of Stony Brook Village's harborfront shopping district, and the hall's exhibits already cover the island's unusually deep musical bench, from Joel and The Stray Cats to Public Enemy. A festival weekend there is a walkable, low-stakes way to spend a fall Friday, with the harbor a few steps away.

Tickets and timing

Discounted early bird passes are on sale now through LIMEHOF, in one-day, three-day and all-inclusive VIP tiers. The organization has said prices will rise when the full festival schedule is announced in late August, which makes the next two weeks the cheapest window to commit.

For anyone who grew up here with Glass Houses in the car or a parent who saw Joel at the Coliseum, the premiere offers something genuinely new: not another retrospective assembled from familiar footage, but 55-year-old tape nobody has heard, of a 22-year-old from Hicksville who did not yet know how the story would turn out. That conversation happened on Long Island, was lost on Long Island, and on September 25 it comes back to Long Island first.