Showtime’s new four-part documentary Spector, targeted on the spectacular rise and spectacular fall of music pioneer and convicted assassin Phil Spector, is the very best promotion for Showtime’s four-part documentary We Need to Talk About Cosby.
It’s such a troublesome tightrope to stroll while you’re attempting to discover a disgraced icon — not merely the separating of the artwork from the artist, however discovering a sensible technique to contextualize the artwork inside the lifetime of the flawed one that created it.
Spector
The Bottom Line
Compelling materials, inconsistent inventive selections.
Airdate: 9 p.m. Sunday, November 6 (Showtime)
Directors: Sheena M. Joyce and Don Argott
W. Kamau Bell’s dialog starter about Bill Cosby dealt with this job exceptionally. It isn’t aesthetically dynamic, however We Need to Talk About Cosby is wise and difficult at each flip, forcing viewers to ponder inextricable linkages between features of Cosby’s profession and a private life that has seen him accused of sexual misconduct by 50+ girls. The documentary emphasizes what you lose if you happen to solely have half of the dialogue, and it offers the instruments and vocabulary to hold that dialogue past the movie.
Sheena M. Joyce and Don Argott’s Spector isn’t in denial about Phil Spector’s myriad imperfections — it might be laborious to be — and it does an admirable factor in trying to offer Lana Clarkson a standing past “tragic victim.” But the documentary is awash in questionable selections that left me scratching my head as a substitute of wanting to interact with any of the challenges in its portrait. There are bizarre aesthetic selections, limitations of construction and disadvantages to the self-selecting speaking heads. Plus I’d argue that the selection of the way to finish the documentary undermines virtually all the things that got here earlier than.
As the fundamental historic recap goes: Phil Spector reshaped in style music, principally for the higher. Before he was 25, he’d written numerous teen pop hits. He had a signature manufacturing tone with an unimaginably cool identify — The Wall of Sound. He launched Tina Turner’s profession, wrapped the profession of the Beatles after which produced a number of of their defining solo hits. He wasn’t within the first spherical of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees (he needed to wait till 1989), however he in all probability ought to have been.
But Phil Spector was troublesome. He was domineering and egomaniacal. He battled varied addictions and psychological demons. He turned a recluse for many years. Oh and in 2009, he was convicted of the 2003 homicide of actress Lana Clarkson and spent the remainder of his life in jail.
These aren’t “contradictions” that you really want or have to reconcile. The documentary begins with the 911 name from Spector’s driver reporting the homicide. The first episode skips forward from its examination of Spector’s rise to introduce Clarkson and particulars concerning the homicide, breaking chronology in order that no stretch of adulation is allowed to go unchecked with out the reminder of the story’s vacation spot.
The documentary has a few hours during which the vast majority of the time is spent on outdated interviews with Spector and conversations with whichever of his colleagues and artists have been prepared to go on-camera to at the very least partially sing the praises of a convicted assassin. And that isn’t a nasty assortment of individuals, together with acquainted names like Darlene Love or Paul Shaffer and plenty of singers and session musicians and fellow producers and songwriters. Plus, Spector’s daughter Nicole is an more and more essential interview topic and a advisor on the sequence.
But then the final two hours are virtually fully about Clarkson and the trial, which is handled with a non-sensationalistic consideration to element that was laborious for the media to attain when it was truly occurring. On the authorized facet, many of the essential figures are current, together with prosecutor Alan Jackson and protection lawyer Linda Kenney Baden. Speaking on Clarkson’s behalf are her mom Donna, a half-dozen associates, varied skilled associates and even legendary filmmaker Roger Corman.
If the documentary achieves something of actual word, it’s tearing to shreds the “B-movie actress Lana Clarkson” narrative that proliferated on the time. Lana Clarkson was a working actress in Hollywood and if she was typecast as various shades of bimbo or prostitute, the business is extra in charge than she was. And if “B-movie actress” was basically remodeled into her posthumous first identify for years, the media is solely in charge. In archival interviews and even in her expertise sizzle reel, which Spector’s protection used to mock her on the trial, she comes throughout as grounded, humorous and good.
It’s laborious, although, to take the refocusing critically when the documentary nonetheless consists of Spector-friendly speaking heads saying issues like, “It must have been awful painful to him to be in prison without his hairpiece” with out even a shred of irony. You get one in all his musicians saying “There was a piece of us that was on trial, too” and all I needed to say was, “Ummm, no there wasn’t.” Ditto when Shaffer displays on Spector’s lonely final years with, “I just thought, ‘What a horrible fate for a legend.’”
To me, there’s a duty from the filmmakers to both select to not embody banal stuff like that or to problem it, and there’s no difficult right here in any respect. If any individual goes to assert that the true tragedy of this complete story was Spector being alone and bald and in a cell — somewhat than the precise human life that was taken — the filmmakers have to immediately ask folks, “Do you think he was innocent?” Otherwise, you’re simply letting delusion and puffery go unchecked. At least Nicole Spector stops wanting explicitly defending her father, principally noting his sincerity together with her and her affection for him.
The administrators don’t need to exonerate him both, however they’re completely blissful to simply accept very simplistic items of armchair psychoanalysis, tracing all the things again to Spector’s father’s suicide, which is depicted within the first episode in silver nitrate grainy black-and-white reenactments. There are virtually no reenactments in any respect in the remainder of the sequence. I’m normally fairly anti-reenactment, however I’m much more against inconsistent use of fashion. If you do a four-hour documentary, both reenactments are a constant a part of the way you’re telling the story or they’re not. Here, they undoubtedly aren’t, simply as there’s no significant technique to justify the entire interminable drone photographs round Spector’s mansion which are within the first episode after which by no means a part of the vocabulary of the documentary once more. The drone photographs give the fort the impression of being virtually haunted or, if you’ll, “spectral,” but when the administrators need to make a Spector/spectral connection, they fail.
I’m getting distracted right here, however that’s what Spector did to me. It has good factors to make and a few of the inventive supplies wanted to make these factors, however no cohesive sense of the way to inform the story or make the argument over 4 hours. And possibly you may be glad with a provocative story proficiently instructed. Maybe you received’t require cohesion, and possibly you received’t suppose {that a} documentary tasked with reclaiming and prioritizing Clarkson’s humanity shouldn’t give Spector and his supporters the final phrase on almost all the things. The dialog this documentary made me need to have was, sadly, principally a couple of documentary that tackled the same job higher.
