Lionel Richie on ‘Greatest Night in Pop’ Still Affecting Huey Lewis

After revealing behind the scenes details about how he helped bring an all-star group of musicians together to make the Grammy-winning smash hit charity single “We Are the World” in the Netflix documentary “The Greatest Night in Pop,” Lionel Richie recently spoke to IndieWire about which of the participants he knows have watched the movie, and are still reeling from the down-to-the-wire recording session.

“Huey Lewis sat next to me while I’m watching the premiere, and he leaned over to me, and he said, ‘I don’t think we’re going to make it,’” the “American Idol” judge said at an event celebrating the reveal of the current season’s Top 10 finalists. “I said, ‘Huey, it’s 39 years ago. It’s been a success.’ But how we set it up, he was a nervous wreck.”

Richie, who both produced the Sundance premiere directed by Bao Nguyen, and appears heavily in the film, is still in awe of what he and his collaborators, including Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, and Stevie Wonder, were able to accomplish immediately after he had hosted the 1985 American Music Awards.

“Honestly, I don’t know how we did it because you go back and look at it now, from two o’clock in the morning to eight o’clock in the morning when Springsteen walked out the door, getting all of those artists on a record with solos, it’s almost an impossibility,” he said. The film shows how it was a team effort made both by the known players like record…