The Beastie Boys tried some citizen camerawork for a new concert film. They bought 50 cameras, handed them out to people at their Oct. 9, 2004 Madison Square Gardens show in their native New York.

A professional crew did the rest. The result is Awesome: I fuckin' shot that!

From the Toronto Star:

The result is incredibly raw, rough and occasionally raunchy. One fan immortalized himself urinating, others depicted themselves buying beer, dancing in the aisles or singing along with the songs — which everyone seems to know by heart.

Most of the fans also managed to grab footage of the Beasties performing. Some scenes are so close you can practically count nostril hairs; others so far away it might have been shot from the parking lot. There is a lot of camera shake, flaring and other amateur snafus; the film is subtitled "An Authorized Bootleg" for good reason.

But it's pure energy and for music fans, it's an absolute blast to experience. The film is scheduled to open in theatres on March 31, and the Beasties don't seem terribly worried about the movie title causing them any problems: the movie posters here have the full rude name. Let the exhibitors worry about that.

The original idea was to make a DVD, said Yauch, who acts as the band's unofficial movie and video director under the deliberately pompous pseudonym Nathaniel Hörnblowér.

He thought of involving the fans after seeing grainy performance video a fan shot using a cellphone, which he uploaded to the band's website.

"It was a real last-minute decision to do it at that Garden show," Yauch said. "We actually just decided three days before the show to try to pull it together."

The conscripting of the 50 amateur camera people, who all apparently worked for free, was done almost at random, although Horovitz allowed his younger brother Oliver, a film school student, to have one of the cameras.

Said Yauch: "We went on our website and asked if people had tickets for the show. The show was already sold out. We asked people who already had tickets if they'd be interested in filming.

"We looked at a seating chart and picked people who were spread out all over the arena. That was the only criteria -- although maybe they had to be over 18."

The cameras all had to be returned after the concert and every single one of them came back. Then the band returned them to the store they had purchased them from, to get a refund.

"Some people out there probably have cameras that were from our movie that they're filming their vacation on," Diamond said.

The Beasties are not only iconoclasts, they're thrifty ones, at that.