Bedroom editing not only agreed with McKay, it was a key advantage in finishing the film: “Many nights I’d edit on deadline until 6 in the morning, pull down the Murphy bed to sleep, then stumble two feet back to my chair to work without ever shutting down the computer. You can’t do that if you’re renting equipment at a studio.”

Final Cut Flow

Given his previous nonlinear editing experience, McKay’s switch to Final Cut Pro was seamless. “I just taught myself. I already knew Premiere, and I knew Avid from watching over my editor’s shoulders, so it was pretty straightforward. I never used the help line because you can figure pretty much anything out with the books,” he says.

McKay describes “Broadway” as a straight-ahead film not laden with complex special effects. But the movie’s visual energy builds from the considerable interplay between images of contemporary talking heads and historical moving bodies — singing, dancing and acting turns culled by McKay from tapes he uncovered of original stage productions of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Bus Stop,” “Carousel,” “West Side Story,” “Camelot” and “Mame.”

“I’m like the last vaudeville act, going town to town, dragging an old star to the theater with me when they’re available.”

“I do lots of zooms on archival footage so I could bring in someone singing 50 years ago, dissolving over to them today, or back and forth,” says McKay. “I kept thinking I’d have to use an outside program for that, but I never did. I just did it all in Final Cut.”

Applause

After picking up awards at more than a dozen film festivals, “Broadway” opened recently in New York, and is scheduled to go much wider, a city at a time. For fans who can’t find the film in theaters, a DVD version, also edited by McKay in Final Cut Pro, is in the works.

In the best theater tradition, McKay travels whenever he can to open the movie live. “I’m like the last vaudeville act, going town to town, dragging an old star to the theater with me when they’re available,” he says. “But the audiences are calling the theaters, and theaters are calling the distributor saying we want this film.”

Given the response, McKay is already working on a sequel, “Broadway: The Next Generation,” featuring 35 younger theater stars such as Alan Cumming, Liev Schreiber and Audra MacDonald. “It picks up the same way, with everyone getting off the bus in midtown,” he says. “But it deals with all the new creative frustrations: chandeliers, staircases, ‘Cats,’ body mikes and artificially-taped music.”

In his on-the-road Q&As McKay frequently makes the point that although “Broadway” reflects his preference for a richer, better theatrical past, its very existence argues the unique creative advantages of the present.

“When I’m asked if it’s a golden age in the theater now, I say I don’t think so. But it’s maybe a golden age of digital documentary filmmaking. I’m just lucky enough to have documented one and to be living through the other.”