With Milwaukee Film getting ready to celebrate 414 Day by screening the Song Sung Blue documentary at the Oriental Theatre, we're taking a timely jump back to our conversation with a key player in the 2008 film about local musical couple Mike and Claire Sardina. Enjoy.
After coming down from our Hugh Jackman interaction at the Song Sung Blue premiere in the final act of 2025, we pulled back the curtain on the Milwaukee connections that inspired the recently released biopic.
For that, we called in local filmmaker Jimmy Sammarco, who was instrumental (pun very intended) in the original Song Sung Blue documentary that brought the story of musical couple Mike and Claire Sardina — aka Lightning & Thunder — into the spotlight back in 2008. In his role as director of photography, he saw the ins and outs of the whole production, including a bombshell cease-and-desist order from Sony Music and an unlikely savior from one of the godfathers of grunge.
Artist bio: Jimmy Sammarco
Filmmaker Jimmy Sammarco is best known as the co-producer and director of photography for the aquatic adventure film The Surface, starring Sean Astin (Lord of the Rings, Rudy) and Chris Mulkey (On the Basis of Sex, Whiplash). He was also the director of photography for the critically acclaimed documentary Song Sung Blue, hailed as “Superb!” by Roger Ebert and which is now the basis for the new feature film starting Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson.
Throughout his career, Sammarco has had the opportunity to work with the rock stars of sports, music and medicine, including future hall of fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers, The Foo Fighters and Nobel Prize Winner for Medicine James P. Allison, Ph.D. Sammarco has also created content for some of America’s most recognizable brands and seven music videos, including the multiple award-winning “The Me You See” by Milwaukee’s own Spiral Trance.
He’s currently producing and directing the documentary Swimming Through Time (Life in the Fast Lane), and will be a producer and director of photography for the feature film Separation, CA in Los Angeles next summer. Other projects include the web series Jimmy Wick and a new content channel under construction called POSINEWS, the mission of which is to deliver inspiring, motivational and encouraging content, including the soon-to-be-released documentary short Indomitable Spirit, which will hit the festival circuit in 2026.
Sammarco is currently a senior vice president and the head of video production at Baird.
