In the documentary “What Will Become of Us,” Frank Lowy, the billionaire founder of the Westfield corporation of shopping malls, has a dilemma: Should he sell his beloved business and go into retirement, or should he keep his business, which he plans to leave to his three sons? At first glance, this might seem like a movie about “rich people’s problems.” However, Lowy (who was born in 1930) has a much more emotionally riveting and fascinating story to tell in this film, which clocks in at a brisk 75 minutes.
Lowy, who was born in the country then known as Czechoslovakia, is not a spoiled heir who was handed his wealth by a privileged parent. He literally has a “rags to riches” story as a Jewish refugee of Nazis who invaded his country and tore his family apart. In “What Will Become of Us,” Lowy, accompanied by his biographer David Kushner, goes back to many of the sites from his childhood that still haunt him.
Growing up, Lowy was bullied and beaten up for being Jewish. His childhood experiences are still painful for him to remember, because he calls the country of his birth “a horrible place” with “sad memories.” From 1943 to 1945, Lowy and his family (his parents, his sister and his brother) lived in Budapest, Hungary. Lowy had a very close relationship with his father, who disappeared when Lowy was 14, during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. Lowy says he still grieves for his father, and he is at his most tearful in the documentary when he talks about his father. Later on in the movie, Lowy finds out what finally happened to his long-lost father.
After fleeing Nazi-occupied Hungary, Lowy and his family went their separate ways. He lived in Palestine and Israel from 1946 to 1952. His sister married a lawyer in Australia, where his mother and brother eventually moved. Lowy later joined them in Australia in 1952, when he began his life as a business mogul in Sydney.
Lowy had humble beginnings in Australia, where he started off as a delivery boy. He saved up enough money to eventually buy a deli and a coffee shop, which he sold and used the money to buy real estate. His real-estate dealings evolved into the shopping-mall business that he is known for today. (In 1960, Lowy co-founded Westfield with John Saunders, who sold his interest in the company to Lowy years later.)
“What Will Become of Us” also delves into Lowy’s personal life. Married to his wife Shirley since 1964, Lowy describes their relationship as “love at first sight” for him when he met her at a Hanukkah party. He was 31, and she was 19 when they met, and they married 18 months later. It sounds like an ideal love story, but Shirley now has Alzheimer’s disease. As Frank describes it, “Physically, she’s there, but mentally she’s not.” She is interviewed in the movie, which shows some instances of her memory loss.
Frank also says that he’s been a hardcore workaholic for decades, so that might be why the documentary doesn’t really give much information about the relationships that he’s had with his three sons: Peter and Steven (the co-CEOs of Westfield) and David, a principal of the Lowy Family Group. All three sons are interviewed in the movie, but they don’t reveal anything about the family dynamics in running the business or how they deal with each other on a personal level. Although Frank is shown being a devoted husband tending to Shirley, one has to wonder how small of a fraction of time that is for him, compared to all the time he admits to spending on his business.
At the beginning of the movie, Frank says it’s “painful” for him to open up negotiations to sell Westfield. If you follow corporate business news, then you know what his decision was on whether or not to sell the company. “What Will Become of Us” isn’t really a window into how Westfield is run, but it’s a fairly effective attempt to make billionaire Frank Lowy look more human and emotionally vulnerable than the ruthless image that corporate moguls like him tend to have.
Wynn Handman might not be a household name, but as an acting teacher and as a co-founder/artistic director of the American Place Theatre in New York City, he’s had an enormous influence on numerous actors who are world-famous and/or highly respected. This talky documentary takes an in-depth, sometimes overly fawning look at Handman’s accomplishments. Even though there’s an impressive array of famous actors who share the experiences they’ve had with Handman, be prepared to sit through a documentary where there’s plenty of interviews and archival photos but unfortunately not enough archival film footage to make it a more vibrant movie.
Handman, who was born in 1922, is also interviewed in “It Takes a Lunatic.” He describes his childhood growing up in Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood as happy. He wanted to be in the Navy, but enrolled in the Coast Guard instead. As a mentor/leader in the profession of acting, Handman is described as both “rough and tumble” and “intellectual” by past colleagues. The movie describes Handman has having two lives and two legacies: first as an acting teacher and later as artistic director of the off-Broadway American Place Theatre.
The celebrities who give testimonials about Handman as an acting coach or American Place Theatre artistic director include Richard Gere, Alec Baldwin, Susan Lucci, Michael Douglas, James Caan, Chris Cooper, Marianne Leone Cooper, Andre Bishop, Connie Britton, Lauren Graham, John Leguizamo and Aasif Mandiv. Lucci says that as an acting coach, Handman was “so encouraging, never destructive.” Baldwin adds that Handman “never gave someone a critique they couldn’t handle.”
After years as a successful acting teacher, Handman took a big career risk by co-founding the American Place Theatre in 1963, with Sidney Lanier and Michael Tolan, at the location that formerly housed St. Clement’s Church in midtown Manhattan. Handman was told that “it would take a lunatic” to operate this unusual theater, because it was a non-profit company, and its business model was to make money from customer subscriptions, not from individual ticket sales. This uncommon approach to operating a theater allowed Handman and the other theater decision makers to take more artistic risks in the theater’s productions, since the sales were already pre-paid through subscriptions.
The American Place’s first full production in 1964 was “The Old Glory,” a trilogy of one-acts by poet Robert Lowell and starring Frank Langella. “The Old Glory” ended up winning five Obie Awards, including Best American Play and Best Actor for Langella. Another notable production in the American Place’s early years was 1967’s “La Turista,” a two-act play by Sam Shepard and starring Sam Waterston and Joyce Aaron. (The documentary includes an interview with Shepard, who died in 2017.)
But the American Place was also known for controversy. Ronald Ribman’s 1965 play “Harry, Noon and Night,” starring Dustin Hoffman as a transvestite Nazi, was controversial, mostly because the play had a live decapitation of a chicken. After those live beheadings sparked a lot of public outrage, the play switched to using fake chickens. “The Cannibals,” George Tabori’s 1974 play about the Holocaust, was one of the American Place’s most divisive productions. The documentary points out that the play was more controversial in the United States than it was in Germany. In the documentary, Handman remembers getting a lot of hate mail every time the American Place was embroiled in controversy.
The words “true,” “truth” and “truthful” are used a lot in the documentary to describe Handman and the people he inspired. Eric Bogosian, whose third one-man play “Drinking in America” was produced by the American Place, says of Handman: “He’s not a lunatic. He’s a true believer.”
Even with interviews and testimonials that talk about all the brilliant work that Handman can take a lot of credit for influencing, there simply isn’t enough filmed footage of a lot of these stage productions. Plays, rehearsals and acting classes in Handman’s heyday were usually not filmed for posterity, so it’s not director Billy Lyons’ fault that still photos are the main visuals he has to work with to show what people are discussing in the documentary. (And thankfully, Lyons chose not to film re-enactments for “It Takes a Lunatic,” which is his first feature film.) Perhaps “It Takes a Lunatic” would have been better-suited as a podcast instead of a movie.
The lack of archival film footage isn’t the documentary’s main shortcoming. By putting Handman on such a high pedestal, the documentary feels like it was made by a star-struck fan instead of a more objective filmmaker. For example, the controversy that Handman created with some of American Place’s productions is acknowledged in the film, but the movie doesn’t interview any of Handman’s critics, rivals or people he inevitably alienated in his career. The constant praise of Handman is repetitive and the movie’s slow pace makes the documentary duller than it needs to be. “It Takes a Lunatic” should be commended for gathering so many well-respected actors to share their admiration of Handman, but the documentary probably won’t be very appealling to people who have no interest in acting or theater productions.
UPDTAE: Netflix will premiere “It Takes a Lunatic” on October 25, 2019.
The documentary “Seahorse,” which is about a pregnant transgender man, gets its name because male (not female) seahorses are the ones who carry and give birth to seahorse babies. The pregnant transgender man in “Seahorse” is Alfred “Freddy” McConnell, a 30-year-old office worker from England, who decides to become a parent and decides that getting pregnant is faster than going through the adoption process. Freddy (who identifies as a gay transgender man) has a live-in transgender boyfriend named CJ Bruce, who plans to help Freddy raise the child. With a ticking biological clock, Freddy goes through the process of medical fertilization, even though he dreads taking the female hormones that will help him get pregnant.
Freddy, who lived between the cities of London and Deal, says that he always wanted to be a parent, and he came out as transgender when he was in college. Raised primarily by a single mother, he describes her as “a massive extrovert with a family of introverts.” Freddy’s mother, Esme Chilton, is supportive of him being transgender. However, Freddy’s estranged father (who split from Freddy’s mother when Freddy was about 8 years old) is having a difficult time accepting that he has a transgender son, and Freddy is afraid to tell his father that he’s pregnant. Childhood photos of Freddy show him to be a tomboyish child. At an early age, Freddy said that he didn’t like to wear dresses and felt that he was trapped in the wrong gender.
Because Freddy is introverted and because his closest family member is supportive of him, “Seahorse” is a quiet movie that doesn’t have a lot of drama and conflict. His fertilization treatments don’t work right away, so he doesn’t get pregnant until halfway through the movie. Waiting this long in the movie to show Freddy finally becoming pregnant is a curious choice that director Jeanie Finlay made—and it has mixed results. On the one hand, it’s a realistic portrayal of how fertilization treatments are rarely effective the first time they are taken. But on the other hand, this is a documentary about a pregnant man, so it drags down the pace of the film to wait until the halfway mark of the movie to show his pregnancy. The process of choosing a sperm donor and the disappointment of failed IVF treatments should have absolutely been included in the film, but better editing would have put all of that in the first third of the movie, not let it go on and on for half of the film.
Freddy goes through a lot of personal angst due to the pregnancy’s effects on his hormones—but, for the most part, he’s not ostracized in his community (because he keeps his pregnancy such a secret) and there are no scenes of him getting strange stares from people. That’s because Freddy goes to great lengths to hide his pregnancy to the outside world. He still dresses as a man, but he wears baggier clothes so that it doesn’t look like he’s pregnant. At one point in the movie, he confesses that he hasn’t told his co-workers and male friends about his pregnancy, and he has taken a leave of absence from his job. In the later stages of the pregnancy, Freddy and his mother relocate to a fairly remote area in Spain, after she spontaneously buys a home there. It’s a convenient move, since Freddy doesn’t have to face any nosy neighbors he might have had in England.
Because Freddy feels like a man, he’s also dealing with the psychological issues of going to back to the feminine physical characteristics that he wanted to get away from as a transgender man. His hips have become rounder, and his breasts are starting to become bigger. As his body goes through these changes, Freddy says, “My appetite has plummeted, my libido has plummeted. I feel softer inside, and I want to talk about my feelings more.”
As Freddy says later in the movie, “If all men got pregnant, pregnancy would be taken more seriously.” Still, because he doesn’t want to have the female biological characteristics that come with pregnancy, he says, “I feel like a fucking alien.” Over a dinner gathering with his mother and some of her friends, the conversation gets a little uncomfortable when one of his mother’s female friends admits that she thinks transgender issues are confusing.
The biggest problem with “Seahorse” is that because the movie takes place in the context of a pregnant man who largely wants to keep his pregnancy a secret, there’s no bigger “real world” insight into what really happens when a transgender man gets pregnant and isn’t afraid to let everyone in his life know about it. Although it’s a much more difficult path to be completely open about this type of pregnancy rather than to keep it a secret, it would also be helpful for people to see a transgender man publicly take those brave steps during the pregnancy in order to lessen the stigma over this type of pregnancy.
Freddy is very isolated from people during his pregnancy; except for CJ, he’s rarely seen with people his own age in this documentary. Even though it’s great that Freddy’s mother thinks he’s “brave,” and she is “in awe of him” for being in this unusual situation, it would have been better to see the reactions of people in Freddy’s world outside his very small inner circle. It’s understandable that Freddy would be afraid to tell people about his pregnancy—and he certainly would have gotten some backlash and criticism from bigots—but his fear could have robbed him of finding out who are the truly compassionate people in his life. The people who accept him as a transgender man are also likely to accept him as a parent. Freddy gives birth at the end of the movie, but “Seahorse” feels almost like a “to be continued” film, because it remains to be seen how Freddy handles the challenges of raising his child, knowing that his unusual pregnancy has been documented for the world to see.
UPDATE: 1091 Media will release “Seahorse: The Dad Who Gave Birth” (formerly titled “Seahorse”) in the U.S. on digital and VOD on June 16, 2020. The film was already released in the U.K. in 2019.
Tragically, there have been several mass shootings in the U.S. before and after the shooting massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018. But the Parkland shootings (which killed 17 people) will be remembered as the flashpoint for an unprecedented movement of young people against gun violence. The documentary “After Parkland” shows how some of the more well-known Parkland survivors coped with the tragedy in the months after the shooting, and how they channeled their grief into passionate activism.
The documentary features some of the former Parkland students who have been at the forefront of this activism. They include survivors David Hogg, Victoria Gonzalez, Sam Zeiff and Dillon McCooty. Also included are parents Manuel Oliver (whose son Joaquin was murdered in the shooting) and Andrew Pollack (whose daughter Meadow was also a Parkland murder victim).
Zeiff, who turned 18 the day after the massacre, says in the documentary that his boss told him after the tragedy, “You don’t look like a kid anymore.” Gonzalez, who was Joaquin Oliver’s girlfriend, turns to Joaquin’s best friend McCooty for support, and vice versa. Gonzalez and McCooty end up going to their prom together, as a tribute to Joaquin. She wore a flower crown with flowers from the first bouquet that Joaquin gave her.
The grief, anger and resilience over the shootings are felt throughout the entire documentary. One of the most emotionally powerful moments in the film is when Manuel Oliver, who is an artist, did an art installation that showed Joaquin in a graduation cap and gown carrying a certificate of death instead of a diploma, with a red stain of spray paint, signifying blood from a gunshot wound. Manuel Oliver and his wife, Patricia, have started an anti-gun-violence, non-profit organization called Change the Ref, in memory of their slain son Joaquin.
The documentary also takes a behind-the-scenes look at the March for Our Lives event on March 24, 2018. The event, which was organized largely by Parkland survivors, had its flagship rally in Washington, D.C., but there were hundreds of other March for Our Lives rallies around the world that were part of the event.
“After Parkland” also gives an up-close look at how some of the high-profile and outspoken student survivors have been handling their sudden thrust into the media spotlight—and the criticism they have been getting from some people who say that these survivors have become activists for fame and money. Hogg in particular has become a media darling, as well as a target for extreme right-wing groups that have called shooting survivors and their parents “bad actors.”
We see in the documentary why Hogg has been all over the media: He has a hard time saying “no” to interviews when he’s surrounded by reporters, and his protective mother often has to step in and put a limit on the media interviews that he does. His passion and his eloquent speaking skills make it clear why he’s one of the unofficial leaders of this Parkland movement, and what he’s fighting for isn’t just a “phase” or a “fad” for him and other Parkland survivor activists.
“After Parkland” co-directors Emily Taguchi and Jake Lefferman are directors/producers of ABC’s “Nightline,” so the documentary (which is backed by ABC News) looks more like a TV production than something that was made for movie theaters. And if you’re a news junkie who’s followed what the Parkland survivors and their families and allies have been doing since the shooting, then you probably won’t find out anything new by watching this documentary. But no matter how people feel about gun laws, “After Parkland” is a rallying cry for those who want to do something about preventing more of these tragedies from happening, instead of just hoping that the problem will just go away.
UPDATE: Kino Lorber will release “After Parkland” in New York City and Los Angeles on November 29, 2019. The movie’s release will expand to more cities in 2020.
“Circus of Books” is a truly unique documentary that tells the behind-the-scenes story of Circus of Books, the Los Angeles-based company that got most of its profits through gay male pornography and operated multiple stores and a production company. Circus of Books—which had the same owners from 1982 until the business closed in February 2019—was literally a “mom and pop” operation, since the business was owned by married couple Karen and Barry Mason, who are the parents of three children. Their middle child, Rachel, directed this film to chronicle the history of Circus of Books and the last days before the business shut down.
Rachel takes the Werner Herzog/Michael Moore documentarian approach of being the narrator, on-camera interviewer and one of the stars of the movie. The documentary begins by showing the history of the bookstore before the Masons owned it. The LGBTQ activist Black Cat demonstration in 1967 in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood preceded the Stonewall demonstrations in New York City by two years, but both were important events in gay civil rights that had similarities, because both were sparked by LGBTQ people fighting back against police harassment and raids of gay nightclubs.
The Black Cat nightclub and the New Faces nightclub were part of the Los Angeles gay nightlife scene in the 1960s. New Faces would eventually become the gay bookstore Book Circus. When Book Circus went out of business, the Masons took it over and renamed the space Circus of Books, which carried a wide array of family-friendly inventory, but it was outsold by what was in the adult section of the store. So how did this straight Jewish couple end up in the gay porn business?
Karen, whom many people in the documentary describe as bossy and domineering, started off as a criminal-justice journalist, who worked for publications such as the Wall Street Journal (in the Chicago bureau) and the Cincinnati Enquirer. Barry, who’s described as gentle and laid-back, used to work at the University of California at Los Angeles’ film department in the mid-1960s, when the Doors members Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek were briefly students there, before the Doors became a world-famous rock band. Barry worked in special effects and had credits that included the original “Star Trek” TV series.
Barry applied his skills in special effects to invent dialysis equipment in the early years of his marriage to Karen. The couple then went into the business together to sell the equipment and were doing well financially. But then they made the mistake of selling the rights to the equipment, and they began to have financial hardships. It was during this challenging time in their marriage that Karen saw an ad seeking distributors for porn magazines. She answered the ad, thinking that it was a temporary way to make money until they could become more financially stable.
When the owner of the West Hollywood store Book Circus was facing eviction because he wasn’t paying his rent, Barry jumped at the chance to take over the business, and he and Karen changed the name of the store to Circus of Books. The business became so successful that they opened a second location in the Silver Lake neighborhood in 1985. (The Silver Lake location closed in 2016.) A third Circus of Books location opened in Sherman Oaks in the late 1980s, but lasted for only two years; it was shut down because of too many neighborhood complaints about the store’s adult content and the clientele it attracted. The Masons further expanded the business by starting a gay porn film-production company. Porn star Jeff Stryker, porn director Matt Sterling and Hustler publisher Larry Flynt are among the Masons’ former colleagues who are interviewed in the movie.
Karen describes herself as religious, while Barry says that he’s not. (Because of their differing views on religion, she calls their relationship a “mixed marriage.”) Even though she and Barry made their living from hardcore porn, Karen says she never really liked to see any of the porn that they sold. She also didn’t want to hear details about the cruising and sexual activities that were going on at Circus of Books. (In 1989, the city of West Hollywood ordered that the store shut down between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., in response to complaints about hustlers at Circus of Books.) Karen’s ability to separate her religious beliefs from her business activities is demonstrated in a scene where she goes to a convention for sex toys and looks over products in a sales-minded, detached manner. It’s almost like she’s the owner of a hardware store who’s shopping for tools and pondering the sales value of what she might buy.
Past and present store employees say that even though Karen never really watched the porn that she sold, what she did watch closely was the financial accounting for the business, and she was a strict “taskmaster” boss, while Barry was more likely to give their employees some slack if they made a mistake. In the years before the Internet changed the porn industry, business was booming for Circus of Books.
Things also began to change for Circus of Books in 1993, when the Masons were busted for transporting obscene material across state lines, due to the mail-order part of their business. The FBI got involved, but the parents kept their legal problems hidden from their three kids. Even though Bill Clinton’s election as U.S. president meant that new prosecutors were appointed to the Masons’ case, the case wasn’t dismissed until 1995. The legal turmoil that the Masons went through had repercussions on the business for many years to come.
As the director of the documentary, Rachel is shown on camera interviewing people, including Circus of Books employees; her parents; and her older and younger brothers. Viewers get to see some of their family dynamics, as Rachel (who describes herself as an artistic free spirit) tries to figure out how her parents’ unusual line of work might have affected their family. Rachel doesn’t really interrogate as much as have conversations with the people involved in the business.
On the one hand, the family is disappointed that they have to close Circus of Books—the rise of Internet porn and gay dating apps such as Grindr essentially made Circus of Books an obsolete business. On the other hand, the business was losing so much money in its last few years (plus, Karen and Barry Mason were getting ready to retire anyway) that shuttering the business is almost a relief for the family.
What viewers won’t be seeing in this documentary are explicit scenes of gay porn, nor will they see undercover video of people cruising at Circus of Books, although there are some people interviewed in the film who talk about their cruising experiences. What’s more surprising (and revealing) is how someone as conservative and religious as Karen lasted as long as she did in the gay porn business. It’s clear from watching the film that she saw the business only as a means to make money to provide a comfortable life for her family. She didn’t see the customers as “family,” only as part of the business.
That emotional detachment explains why Karen had a difficult time coming to terms with her homophobia when her youngest child, Josh (Rachel’s younger brother), came out as gay when he was in college. (By contrast, Barry was more accepting of Josh’s sexual orientation.) In the documentary, Josh talks about the anguish of keeping his sexuality a secret.
And in case anyone is ignorant enough to think his parents’ line of work made him gay, Josh reiterates that he would be gay regardless of what his parents did for a living. According to the documentary, when the Mason children were growing up, Karen and Barry apparently went to great lengths not to expose their children to the porn that Karen and Barry sold. The spouses kept the type of business they did a secret for many years from their children and people in their straight community. In the years before the Internet existed, it was easier to keep this type of secret.
Growing up, Josh was considered the “perfect” child who excelled in school, but he was afraid to come out as gay because he knew it would upset his mother. The irony is not lost on Rachel, who confronts her mother about the hypocrisy of making a living from gay customers and yet not be willing to accept that one of her children is part of the gay community too. The documentary points out that it took years for Karen to be at the place where she is now: a proud member of PFLAG, the organization for parents, families and friends of lesbians and gays.
“Circus of Books” is a low-budget film that keeps the production values very basic in telling the story. There’s no fancy editing or arty cinematography. The movie also strikes the right balance between showing touches humor but not at the expense of addressing serious topics, such as the effect that the AIDS crisis had on numerous Circus of Books customers and employees. On the surface, the movie is about a gay porn business and how it affected the gay social scene in Los Angeles. But underneath the surface, this documentary is really about how this “mom and pop” business affected the family who owned it.
Netflix will premiere “Circus of Books” on April 22, 2020.
The documentary film “I Want My MTV” should come with a warning that the movie is primarily the story of MTV’s first decade in the 1980s. Even with that narrow view, the film misses the mark in many areas. The documentary relies too heavily on the words of the self-congratulatory executives who founded MTV, instead of taking a more responsible, investigative approach and seeking out a more diverse array of perspectives of people who are also part of MTV’s history. The film delivers if you want a predictable and superficial ride down memory lane—commentary on artists and old music videos are expected—but this documentary glosses over and ignores a lot of MTV’s real history.
The story of MTV (Music Television) has been already told in several books, news reports and articles. The network had humble beginnings, because it had a tiny start-up budget, and many people (including a few of its early executives) thought MTV was a bad idea that would fail. MTV’s early network-identification promo video that had NASA footage of the 1969 moon landing was prompted out of necessity because the footage was in the public domain (in other words, free), and MTV couldn’t really afford a fancy ad campaign at the time. Launched on August 1, 1981, MTV started out as a 24-hour music network that initially wasn’t even available in a lot of big cities, such as New York, where MTV is headquartered.
MTV’s lack of availability on many cable systems was the impetus for the famous “I Want My MTV” ad campaign where major artists (such as Mick Jagger, Billy Idol, Cyndi Lauper, Boy George, The Police, David Bowie and The Who’s Pete Townshend) said the “I Want My MTV” slogan on camera, and urged people to call their local cable companies to add MTV to their channel lineups. Les Garland, who used to be a programming executive at MTV, takes credit for getting Jagger to do an “I Want My MTV” spot, by essentially convincing the money-minded Jagger that he would be filming a promotional video, not an ad. As a joke, Garland said he paid Jagger just $1 after the spot was filmed.
MTV’s music library also started off very small, as most of the initial videos available were from British artists (who were used to making music videos for shows like “Top of the Pops”) or American artists whose music videos usually consisted of cheaply filmed live performances with the studio recordings dubbed in post-production. The first two videos played on MTV exemplified these types of clips: the futuristic “Video Killed the Radio Star” from The Buggles (a British New Wave band) and the simple performance clip “You Better Run” from Pat Benatar, who was America’s top female rock star at the time.
Several artists who became popular on MTV in the early ‘80s are interviewed in the documentary, such as Benatar and her guitarist/husband Neil Geraldo; Idol; Sting (co-founder of The Police); Eurythmics members Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart; REO Speedwagon lead singer Kevin Cronin; and Devo lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh. Also interviewed are two of MTV’s original VJs: Mark Goodman (a radio vet who describes his MTV audition process as “a little creepy” because it was in a hotel room, not a TV studio) and Alan Hunter, a self-described failed actor who got the job, despite having a “terrible” audition and no experience in broadcasting or the music industry. (MTV’s other original VJs—Nina Blackwood and Martha Quinn—are not interviewed, although there is archival footage of all the original VJs in the documentary. J.J. Jackson, another original MTV VJ, died of a heart attack in 2004, at the age of 62.)
To its credit, the documentary does not shy away from the controversy over MTV’s programming decisions. In its first two years, the network was frequently accused of racism for not playing enough black artists. MTV’s all-white first executive team—which included John Lack, Bob Pittman, Gail Sparrow, Fred Seibert, Tom Freston, Judy McGrath, John Sykes and Andrew Setos (Garland joined MTV later, after he had a long stint in radio)—are all interviewed in this documentary. Various excuses are given for excluding top-selling black artists from MTV’s playlists in the network’s early years.
One frequently given excuse is that the original concept of MTV was that it was supposed to be a rock’n’roll music channel. However, it’s a weak excuse because among the few black artists played on MTV in its early years were non-rock acts such as Musical Youth, Eddy Grant and Herbie Hancock. Meanwhile, bigger artists such as Michael Jackson, Prince, Rick James and Earth, Wind & Fire were being ignored by MTV.
The documentary includes a clip from the notorious 1983 MTV interview that Bowie did with Goodman, where Bowie asks Goodman why so few black artists are played on MTV. Goodman uncomfortably explains that too many black artists on MTV might scare the audience, especially those in “middle America.” It’s an incredibly racist belief, not to mention a condescending insult that wrongfully stereotypes people in the Midwest as automatically more racist than people who live on the East Coast and West Coast. Bowie’s withering stare and curt response in the interview speak volumes of his disgust. In the documentary, a present-day Goodman admits to being embarrassed about the interview all these years later, and he offers a sheepish apology for it.
The Bowie/Goodman interview exposed the mentality of MTV executives at the time, but the former MTV executives interviewed for this documentary who were in charge of making those decisions are still indignant and in denial over their racism. It’s not too surprising, because people who want to be thought of as “liberal” and “open-minded” don’t want to admit on camera that they’ve been racist. The former MTV executives are quick to pat themselves on the back in this documentary (Sparrow calls herself and the other executives “trend-setters, risk-takers and rebels”), but they don’t properly acknowledge their old-fashioned bigoted beliefs that prevented a lot of people of color from being part of MTV in its early years.
One example of this hypocrisy is when Sparrow, with hatred still etched on her face, talks about how Rick James’ “Super Freak” video was unacceptable to MTV at the time because James reminded her of a pimp and she didn’t like the way women were portrayed in the video. Yet, she doesn’t mention that MTV was willing to play videos from numerous (white) heavy-metal bands that often showed women in much more degrading scenarios, such as barely clothed or locked up in cages. Maybe MTV executives like Sparrow just didn’t like to see a music video of a black man being a sex symbol with women of different races. James was an outspoken critic of MTV at the time for not playing enough black artists, so it’s likely that MTV also had an unofficial ban on James, out of spite.
One of the most irresponsible parts of the “I Want My MTV” documentary is how it fails to give the full story of how Michael Jackson broke the racial barrier at MTV. Pittman tries to rewrite MTV history in this documentary by saying about the racism accusations: “Michael Jackson single-handedly pulled us out of that controversy,” and that it was MTV’s idea to “start courting Michael Jackson.” He also makes it sound like MTV had the vision to play Jackson’s videos right when his “Thriller” album was hitting big. What Pittman and the documentary did not talk about was the well-documented fact that CBS/Epic Records (namely, record-label chief Walter Yetnikoff) demanded that MTV play Jackson’s “Billie Jean” video or else the record company would boycott MTV. When MTV caved in, and saw that Jackson became the network’s most-requested artist, that opened the doors for more black artists to be played on MTV.
Yetnikoff, who was not interviewed for this documentary, told more details about this controversy in his 2001 memoir, “Howling at the Moon,” as well as in several media interviews. His credible account of MTV playing Michael Jackson only after MTV was threatened with a boycott has also been verified by numerous non-MTV people in the music industry who were involved at the time, none of whom are interviewed in this documentary.
The movie mentions that as MTV’s popularity grew in the 1980s, tensions grew between MTV and record companies because the record companies eventually wanted MTV to pay licensing fees for the videos. However, this documentary did not interview anyone who worked at record companies at the time to give their perspective. Video-promotion executives, who were on the front lines of music-industry relations with MTV, are shamefully left out of this documentary. Unlike some big-name artists, these past and present record-company executives are not that hard to get for interviews, so not including them in this film just shows that these documentary filmmakers were too lazy to get this valuable insight or they just didn’t care.
And even though “I Want My MTV” addresses the issue of MTV excluding many top-selling black artists in the network’s early years, ironically, the documentary does some noticeable racial excluding of its own, since no women of color are interviewed in the documentary at all. The movie focuses primarily on MTV in the ‘80s, and gives a spotlight to a long list of artists from that era, so it’s mind-boggling that this documentary erases black female artists who had a big impact on MTV in the ‘80s—such as Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson and Salt-N-Pepa—by not giving a spotlight to any of these women of color.
No disrespect to Tegan and Sara (who were never really big artists on MTV but are interviewed in this documentary anyway), but there are plenty of women of color who were more influential in MTV’s history who could have been interviewed for this documentary but weren’t. The few people of color in this film who are interviewed are black men who talk about hip-hop or “Yo! MTV Raps”: Fab 5 Freddy, Ed Lover and Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniel, who says that Run-DMC was probably the first popular MTV rap act because Run-DMC incorporated a lot of rock music in its songs.
MTV’s influence in hard rock/heavy-metal’s popularity in the mid-to-late 1980s—as well as many of the genre’s sexist videos that got heavy airtime on MTV—are also addressed in the documentary. On the one hand, former MTV executive McGrath says that all that sexist content was “demoralizing.” On the other hand, she and other executives were responsible for choosing to give it so much airtime on MTV. Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” video (which shows model Bobbie Brown being blasted with a fire hose by members of the band wearing firefighter hats) is mentioned in the documentary as an example of the types of MTV-approved rock videos where women were frequently treated as nothing more than playthings and props. Poison lead singer Bret Michaels, who’s interviewed in the documentary, says the popular MTV videos that Poison made were all in good fun.
Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson offers a different perspective of how the testosterone-fueled, often-sexist hard rock videos that MTV favored had an effect on her own career. She and her lead-singer sister Ann Wilson (who co-founded the rock band Heart) became successful with Heart in the mid-‘70s, when they didn’t have to wear revealing clothing to sell records. But by the mid-‘80s, Heart’s record company was pressuring them to make sexpot videos with cleavage-baring outfits that the Wilson sisters say they now regret doing. Nancy Wilson says that a lot of that pressure was because of MTV’s preference of showing rock videos with scantily clad women.
Music-video directors are given minimal scrutiny in the documentary. Mark Pellington, an early MTV hire, is interviewed, and says he was hired even though he had no experience at the time. A few music-video directors who went on to become major film directors are barely mentioned in the documentary, such as David Fincher and Michael Bay. However, the film does talk about how Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video (directed by John Landis) was a game-changer that impacted how videos were made, as budgets became larger and concepts became more elaborate.
In addition to “Thriller,” other music videos that are mentioned as the most-influential of the 1980s include a-ha’s “Take on Me,” Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” and Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.” And although there are numerous artists whose careers were boosted because their videos got played on MTV, the documentary mentions that a few artists had their careers damaged by this exposure. Billy Squier is singled out in particular, for his 1984 “Rock Me Tonite” video (in which he awkwardly dances and slithers around in a “Flashdance”-styled ripped tank top), which ruined his rock credibility, and his career was never the same.
The documentary shows that the end of MTV’s ’80s golden era was around 1987, when some of the original team of network executives and VJs began to leave. It was also around this time that MTV began introducing more non-music programs, such as the game show “Remote Control,” which had a then-unknown Adam Sandler as a cast member.
As former MTV executive Freston says in the documentary, reality TV was “a blessing and a curse” for MTV. Grammy-winning musician Jack Antonoff adds that he (just like many other people who grew up with MTV) became frustrated with the decrease in music content on MTV over the years. The documentary also interviews OK Go, Good Charlotte twins Benji and Joel Madden and indie rock twins Tegan and Sara to offer their perspectives of musicians who were toddlers or weren’t even born when MTV was launched. (By 2010, MTV removed the words “music television” from its logo.)
One of the biggest flaws in the documentary is how it barely mentions the impact of the annual MTV Video Music Awards, which launched in 1984. Many of MTV’s biggest pop-culture moments came from the MTV VMAs. Perhaps the filmmakers couldn’t get the rights to a lot of VMA footage, but that shouldn’t have prevented the documentary from giving more time to discuss the VMAs, other than a passing mention.
Because the focus of “I Want My MTV” is so heavily concentrated on 1980s-era MTV, the documentary breezes through mentions of MTV’s post-1980s programming, such as “The Real World,” “Singled Out” and “Jersey Shore.” Artists who became popular on MTV after the ‘80s are barely acknowledged, so don’t expect to see anything significant about Eminem, Nirvana, the Spice Girls, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Sean Combs, Jennifer Lopez, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears or any boy bands. Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell and Tori Amos are among the few ’90s-era artists who are interviewed in the documentary. It’s briefly mentioned at the end of the film that YouTube (which launched in 2005) has significantly decreased MTV’s influence, and YouTube is now the main outlet where people see music videos.
“I Want My MTV” could have been a better documentary if directors Tyler Measom and Patrick Waldrop didn’t let the film be dominated by executives who haven’t worked at MTV in years, and if the filmmakers included a wider variety of people whose careers were also significantly impacted by MTV. In order to do a truly comprehensive history of MTV, the documentary probably should have been an episodic series instead of a feature-length film. “I Want My MTV” also comes at a time when a lot of people don’t want MTV, because the network just isn’t that relevant to pop culture as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. But for people nostalgic about MTV’s glory days and looking for a thorough examination of MTV’s history, this documentary is ultimately an incomplete disappointment with a lot of valuable perspectives shut out of the film.
UPDATE: A&E will premiere “I Want My MTV” as part of the “Biography” series on September 8, 2020.
Bill Wyman, who was the bass player for the Rolling Stones from 1962 until he quit the band in 1993, has been a Rolling Stones archivist for decades. He has shared his mementos and memories in various ways, including in his 1990 memoir “Stone Alone” and his 2001 photo book “Rolling With the Stones.” The documentary “The Quiet One” is essentially an updated, movie version of Wyman’s books—there’s plenty of great stuff pulled from the archives, but if you’re looking for a truly revealing tell-all, then you’ll have to look elsewhere.
The movie’s title comes from the image that Wyman had of being “the quiet one” in the band. During his time in the Rolling Stones, Wyman was also known for being the most aloof in the band, and he says he was the only member of the Rolling Stones who didn’t abuse drugs. That’s not news to die-hard Rolling Stones fans or anyone who’s read “Stone Alone,” but it might come as a surprise to those who know very little about Wyman. Sex is the only addiction that Wyman confesses that he had during his heyday with the Rolling Stones, but “The Quiet One” doesn’t have the braggadocio that Wyman had in “Stone Alone,” where he claimed that he bedded many more women on tour than all of his bandmates. Not surprisingly, Wyman’s 10-year marriage to first wife Diane ended in divorce in 1969.
Although “The Quiet One” barely mentions Wyman’s first marriage, the documentary offers a little more insight into how Wyman was as a divorced dad who had full custody of his son Stephen, who was born in 1962. Being a divorced father with full custody was rare in the 1970s, and being a rock star in that family situation was even more unusual. As he did in “Stone Alone,” Wyman hints that he got full custody because Stephen showed signs of neglect when the child had been living with Diane. Through home movies and photos, Stephen is seen as a constant companion to Wyman and his then-partner Astrid Lundstrom, who was in a relationship with Wyman from 1967 to 1983. Unfortunately, Stephen was not interviewed for this documentary. However, it’s clear that when the Rolling Stones temporarily moved to France in the early 1970s for tax reasons, the reason why Wyman said he hated it was because he was separated from Stephen, who lived with Wyman’s parents in England during this time.
Some of the movie’s content has been seen before in Wyman’s books and in Rolling Stones documentaries such as “Charlie Is My Darling,” “The Stones in the Park” and “Gimme Shelter.” Most of the material from Wyman’s archives are photos, audio recordings and brief snippets of home movies and off-stage band footage, such as the Stones frolicking at a hotel pool in the mid-1960s or flying on a private jet in the early 1970s. New interviews with fellow music stars Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Mary Wilson (formerly of the Supremes), Bob Geldof and Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts are not seen but are only heard in voiceovers. The other members of the Rolling Stones—lead singer Mick Jagger and guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood—did not give new interviews for this documentary. There are also many stylized closeups of someone pushing play or stop on an old audio cassette recorder, to add to the ambience of the retrospective footage.
During the first three-quarters of the movie, Wyman is shown mostly from behind, sitting in front of a computer in the Stones archive room of his home, with his voice heard in voiceovers. It isn’t until the last quarter of the movie that the present-day Wyman is fully shown on camera in new footage, whether it’s of him taking photos (one of his hobbies), puttering in his garden, or being interviewed with his third and current wife, Suzanne Acosta Wyman. (They’ve been married since 1992, and they have three daughters together.) The full reveal of Wyman in the latter part of the movie is a metaphor for how Wyman wasn’t able to fully open up until later in his life, when he was away from the Rolling Stones spotlight, and after he settled down with Acosta and started a new family with her. She’s the only romantic partner of Wyman’s who’s interviewed for this movie.
The best thing about “The Quiet One” is that it offers a thrilling journey through music history. Rolling Stones songs that are in the movie include “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Paint It Black,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Brown Sugar,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Miss You” and “Start Me Up.” There is also early footage of the Stones when they were primarily a blues covers band. Wyman’s solo career is briefly mentioned, as is his post-Stones work with the Rhythm Kings, a rotating group of musicians that play retro rock and blues. The documentary has a great selection of songs for its soundtrack, but the sound mixing is sometimes uneven. The movie also has some dramatic recreations with actors, as well as animated footage, which are production choices that sometimes annoy documentary purists.
“The Quiet One” offers a psychological explanation for Wyman’s ability to remain stoic in a mercurial, superstar band whose highs and lows have been well-documented. Wyman’s emotionally distant parents, especially his father, didn’t expect him to go beyond his financially disadvantaged working-class background. Wyman (who was born William Perks but changed his last name to Wyman after he decided to become a professional musician) says only his maternal grandmother had faith that he would become world-famous, and she was ridiculed in the family for believing in him. The combination of growing up poor and having most of his family members discouraging his dreams of being a musician led to Wyman often feeling emotionally “empty” and having lifelong insecurities over whether or not he deserved the success that came his way.
One of the most poignant moments in the movie is near the end when Wyman chokes up and tearfully remembers meeting his biggest musical hero, Ray Charles, who asked Wyman to play on his next album, but Wyman turned down the offer because he didn’t think we was “good enough” to work with Charles. Through the tears, you can feel how Wyman is reliving the experience and how he must have felt humbled, star-struck and inferior in the presence of his legendary idol. You can also sense that even though Wyman might have regretted turning down the offer, he probably would’ve had the same response if Charles were still alive and made the same offer today.
Authorized documentaries about celebrities have their pros and cons. The obvious advantage is the documentary will have exclusive access to interviews and other footage that an unauthorized documentary might be prevented from getting. The downside is that authorized documentaries often gloss over unflattering details.
The way “The Quiet One” describes Wyman’s ill-fated marriage to second wife Mandy Smith is one such example of how the documentary doesn’t adequately address the biggest controversy of Wyman’s life. Wyman says in “The Quiet One” that he fell in love with Smith at first sight, but she wasn’t old enough to date at the time. What he doesn’t mention in the documentary is that Smith was only 13 and he was almost 47 when they met. In past interviews, Smith admitted that she and Wyman secretly dated while she was underage, and they began having sex when she was 14. They got married in 1989, when Smith was 18, and they officially divorced in 1991. In the documentary, Wyman says of the marriage: “I was stupid to think it would actually work.”
Wyman’s pre-marital relationship with Smith was not only scandalous, it was also illegal for several years. In “The Quiet One” documentary, Wyman does not explain why he was sexually attracted to a barely pubescent girl, nor does director Oliver Murray acknowledge the disturbing and inappropriate aspects of that relationship, except for a brief flash of a newspaper article that mentions Wyman’s romantic interest in Smith began when she was 13. Even though Wyman appears to be an upstanding family man now, the way he pursued Smith when she was an underage child is the very definition of what a sexual predator does. Wyman’s excuse (which he’s given in his memoir “Stone Alone” and past interviews) was that Smith looked like an adult when she was 13.
Needless to say, Wyman and Smith’s illegal relationship would have absolutely had more serious consequences for him if it had been going on today. In this #MeToo era, society has been far less likely to overlook people’s misdeeds when it comes to the abuse of power and sex. Sheffield Doc/Fest in England dropped “The Quiet One” from its 2019 lineup, and canceled a post-screening Q&A with Wyman and Murray that would have taken place on June 7, after receiving numerous complaints that the movie irresponsibly covers up the serious issue of statutory rape. In its attempt to erase or minimize unsettling aspects of Wyman’s personal life, “The Quiet One” completely ignores another bizarre twist to Wyman’s relationship with Smith: In 1993, Wyman’s son Stephen got married to Mandy Smith’s mother, Patsy Smith, but the marriage ended two years later.
Wyman’s refusal to acknowledge the scandalous mess resulting from his relationship with Mandy Smith is not the only example of how Wyman may not be the most reliable narrator of his life story that he tells in this movie. The Rolling Stones famously headlined a free concert at London’s Hyde Park on July 5, 1969. The concert, which had an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 people in attendance, took place just two days after former Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones had died in a mysterious drowning, which happened one month after Jones had left the band. It was also the first concert that the Rolling Stones performed with guitarist Mick Taylor, who had replaced Jones.
Unfortunately, it’s widely considered one of the worst high-profile concerts that the Rolling Stones ever performed. The Stones were ragged and out-of-tune, the band’s tribute to Jones was awkward (white butterflies were carted in to be released on stage, but most of the butterflies died in the boxes), and the death of Jones brought an air of sadness to the event. The way that Wyman describes the concert is certainly questionable. He says that it was a “wonderful concert” that went so smoothly that “it was like a dream” and there were “no drugs”—but it’s a description which simply isn’t true when it’s been well-documented that Richards and several members of the band’s entourage were strung out on drugs at the time. Fortunately, there was no real violence at the Hyde Park concert.
The same can’t be said for the Altamont festival that was held in the San Francisco area on December 6, 1969, when four people died, including a man who was stabbed to death by Hell’s Angels gang members while the Rolling Stones were performing. So much has already been written, said, and revealed about the Altamont tragedy (including in the documentary “Gimme Shelter”), that “The Quiet One” offers no new insight. Wyman, who is more comfortable dealing with facts than emotions when discussing his life and the Rolling Stones, expresses the expected remorse over the concert, but he doesn’t talk about what it was really like to go through that trauma. As with many aspects of his life, Wyman will only admit that he pushed his feelings aside to get through the situation at hand.
And that’s probably why the documentary doesn’t mention two more recent things that are probably touchy subjects with Wyman: He’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which he announced in 2016. Wyman also reunited with the Rolling Stones as a guest performer for the band’s 50th anniversary concerts in London in 2012, but the reunion ended on a sour note when Wyman gave post-concert interviews complaining the experience was “disappointing” for him because the band didn’t give him enough time on stage. Wyman was subsequently not invited to be a guest performer on the Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary tour, but former Stones guitarist Taylor (who was also at the 2012 London shows) was included on the tour as a guest performer.
Wyman admitted in “Stone Alone,” as he does “The Quiet One,” that because he was so different from the other members of the Rolling Stones, he often distanced himself from their behind-the-scenes antics and drama. He was in the band, but he remained somewhat of an outsider within the group. His desire to have a more “normal” life was the main reason why he retired from the band, and it allowed him to lead a more content lifestyle with his current wife and family. “The Quiet One” shows that Wyman is indeed different from the rest of the Rolling Stones, who continue to tour the world for the millions in revenue and for the huge crowds. It’s the kind of money and adulation that Wyman says he doesn’t need to be happy, so he can live life and make music on his own terms.
IFC Films/Sundance Selects will release “The Quiet One” in select U.S. theaters on June 21, 2019.
The documentary “All I Can Say” gets its title from the first line of “No Rain,” the biggest hit song from Blind Melon, the rock band that released only two studio albums when lead singer Shannon Hoon died of a cocaine overdose in 1995, at the age of 28. Unlike most documentaries, which combine archival footage with new interviews, “All I Can Say” consists entirely of footage that Hoon filmed of his life from 1990 to 1995, the years when Blind Melon existed with Hoon as lead singer. Danny Clinch, Taryn Gould and Colleen Hennessy (who are credited as co-directors) assembled the footage and made it into this film.
The 2019 Tribeca Film Festival has the world premieres of three documentaries about lead singers of rock bands who had untimely, tragic deaths in the 1990s, and all three men left behind a toddler or infant child to grow up without their father. The documentaries are “All I Can Say”; “Sublime” (whose lead singer Bradley Nowell died in 1996 of a heroin overdose); and “Mystify: Michael Hutchence” (about INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence, who committed suicide in 1997). “All I Can Say” is the most unique of this trio of movies, simply because it’s filmed from a first-person perspective with no outside commentary or current footage. There are voiceovers, but they are of interviews that Hoon did during the five-year period in which the documentary footage was filmed.
Almost all of the footage in “All I Can Say” is shown in chronological order, but it begins on a chilling note, with the last footage that Hoon filmed of himself. It shows him in a New Orleans hotel room, talking on the phone to an unidentified person, on October 21, 1995, the day that he died. Before this final footage can be seen in its entirety, the movie then rewinds to 1990, when Hoon was living in Los Angeles as a struggling musician, but also going back home to visit family in Indiana, where he grew up in the suburban cities of Lafayette and Dayton.
It’s clear from these first few scenes that even before he was famous, Hoon was a self-described troublemaking rebel who couldn’t wait to get out of Indiana to become a rock star. He had drug problems and arrests before he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his dream. He also had a high-school sweetheart named Lisa Crouse, who was in a relationship with him during the time all of this footage was filmed.
It was while in Los Angeles that Hoon met the musicians who would become the other members of Blind Melon: lead guitarist Rogers Stevens, rhythm guitarist Christopher Thorn, bassist Brad Smith and drummer Glen Graham. The band’s name was inspired by the nickname that stoner hippies gave themselves in Graham and Smith’s home state of Mississippi. But it was Hoon’s Indiana roots that proved to be a major factor in Blind Melon’s career, because Guns N’Roses lead singer Axl Rose, whose hometown was Lafayette, knew Hoon’s half-sister Anna from high school.
Guns N’Roses was one of the biggest bands in the world at the time, and Hoon became friends with Rose in Los Angeles. Hoon did guest backup vocals on several Guns N’Roses songs (including “Don’t Cry” and “The Garden”) that would be released on Guns N’Roses’ 1991 albums “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II.” There’s footage in the documentary of Hoon with Guns N’Roses at the Record Plant recording studio in Los Angeles.
Hoon’s prominent appearance in the “Don’t Cry” video catapulted him into the spotlight, and it became the catalyst for a quickie route to Blind Melon signing with Capitol Records, at a time when Blind Melon didn’t even have enough original songs for a showcase. The documentary has footage of Blind Melon recording the band’s 1992 self-titled debut album, including signature tune “No Rain.” There’s also footage of Hoon watching the 1992 Los Angeles riots on TV.
The documentary shows that Hoon’s heavy drug use was ongoing throughout the period of time that this movie was filmed. In one scene, he holds up a bag of psychedelic mushrooms. In other scene, he and Stevens are seen doing cocaine on Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills. In other scene, a coked-out Hoon is talking about being awake for several days. There’s also a hint that Hoon’s substance-abuse problems were probably passed down from a previous generation, since there’s a scene of him on the phone with his father after his father was arrested for DUI.
Blind Melon’s self-titled debut album was a big hit (selling 4 million copies in the U.S. alone), and it remains the band’s best-selling album, known for the singles “No Rain,” “Tones of Home,” “I Wonder” and “Change.” But that quick success came at a price, because Blind Melon became known as the “bee girl” band, which was an image the band ended up hating. First, the album cover was of drummer Graham’s younger sister Georgia as a child, dressed as a bee when she was in a school play. Then, Blind Melon’s “No Rain” video prominently featured another child—actress Heather DeLoach—dressed in a similar bee costume.
The “No Rain” video, directed by Samuel Bayer (who also directed Nirvana’s iconic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video), has the concept of a lonely bee girl who is rejected and ridiculed by society until she walks into an open field where she finds that there are other bee people just like her. Blind Melon is shown performing in the field, but “Bee Girl” DeLoach actually ends up being a scene-stealer in the video. For a while, she became a minor celebrity in real life. It’s obvious that the “bee girl” image was starting to annoy the band, because Blind Melon was constantly asked about it in interviews. In one such interview that’s shown in the documentary, Hoon says with an exasperated voice, “The bee is bigger than the band.”
Another major fame-related issue that Blind Melon had was the lead singer got most of the attention—and that didn’t sit well with the rest of the band. (It’s a common issue with most famous bands.) Blind Melon was on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1993 (when being on the cover of Rolling Stone was still a big deal), and the documentary shows how that cover caused a lot of tension in the band behind the scenes. Rolling Stone originally wanted only Hoon on the cover, but the other band members insisted that they be on the cover too.
The documentary shows video footage that Hoon secretly recorded of the band members talking about him when he wasn’t in the room. “All I Can Say” also shows Blind Melon’s photo session for Rolling Stone—all the band members were completely naked—and the cover photo ended up showing Hoon, front and center, in pig-tailed braids. The documentary also shows Stevens’ giddy and happy reaction to seeing the magazine cover for the first time.
“All I Can Say” also shows a mischievous, devil-may-care side to Hoon, such as a scene of him delivering pizza on-stage naked, a scene of him trying to channel the Beatles while walking on London’s famous Abbey Road, and a full-frontal nude scene of him filming himself completely naked in front of a bathroom mirror. There are also a few rock-star diva moments, such as when Hoon taunts a security guard backstage at a concert for some real or perceived conflict. Hoon treats the guard in a condescending manner, essentially saying, “I dare you to pick a fight with me, but you won’t, because I’m untouchable.”
Hoon was arrested for indecent exposure in 1993 for urinating on a fan during a Blind Melon concert in Vancouver, but that footage isn’t in the documentary, although the arrest is briefly mentioned in a TV news report that Hoon filmed. Hoon was also arrested in 1995 in New Orleans for disorderly conduct. That arrest isn’t shown in the movie either.
Since most people watching this movie know how Hoon died, there’s a sense of impending doom when watching “All I Can Say”—and there are plenty of signs that despite the fame and success, Hoon was deeply troubled and immersed in drug addiction. In one scene, he has a spoon that looks like it’s dripping with melted heroin. In another scene, he openly talks about doing smack. Hoon’s drug addiction was well-known to people in the industry and to Blind Melon fans, and he had multiple stints in rehab. The rehab stints are obviously not in the movie, but the documentary includes footage of Hoon getting a message from Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready asking for Hoon’s advice on rehab.
Hoon’s emotional turmoil must have also been compounded by a suicide that he and other band members witnessed after one of Blind Melon’s shows at St. Andrews Hall in Detroit, where a woman in her 20s jumped to her death at a nearby hotel. (Blind Melon’s song “St. Andrew’s Fall” on the band’s 1995 second album, “Soup,” is about that horrifying experience.) In the documentary, Hoon is seen confessing that witnessing the suicide was the hardest moment for him in the band.
Other haunting footage is of Hoon watching TV news about the suicide of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain (who died in 1994 at the age of 27), and later commenting about Cobain’s death in an interview: “A lot of people are hurting, including his little girl.” The irony is that one year later, Hoon would also leave his own little girl behind by tragically dying. Hoon and Crouse welcomed their daughter, Nico, on July 11, 1995. The documentary has footage of Hoon finding out he was going to be father, seeing ultrasounds, the birth of Nico, and Hoon being a loving and affectionate father to Nico.
One month after the birth of Nico, Blind Melon’s second album, “Soup,” was released, and it was the band’s sophomore slump. Even though there’s a scene where a band member jokes that Blind Melon isn’t that popular anymore, the band’s big decline in sales was obviously a blow to the band’s confidence. And although Hoon didn’t reveal on camera how this career decline affected him, there’s one scene in the movie that clearly shows how depressed he was.
At home celebrating his 28th birthday, Hoon is seen with Crouse and Nico, who are seated at a table with him. A birthday cake is on the table, and while Crouse is smiling and singing “Happy Birthday,” Hoon sits there sadly, deep in his own thoughts. It’s impossible to know if Hoon’s personal problems or career problems (or both) were weighing him down at that moment, but it’s obvious that being surrounded by his closest loved ones on his birthday wasn’t making him happy.
We’ll never know what Hoon would be doing if he were alive today. Blind Melon’s third album, “Nico,” was released in 1996, and featured songs the band had already recorded with Hoon. After going on hiatus, Blind Melon regrouped in 2006 with new lead singer Travis Warren. But in that five-year period when Hoon experienced his meteoric rise to stardom, we get to see his perspective in “All I Can Say” as a talented but self-destructive person who found out that fame wasn’t the answer to his problems.
Hoon might have escaped from Indiana, but he couldn’t escape from himself. The tragedy is that Hoon left behind a child who didn’t know what it was like to grow up with her father. But at least she can see from this footage that she was adored by him in the short time that he was in her life, and he left behind a musical legacy that affects people who are fans of Blind Melon’s early music.
UPDATE: Oscilloscope Laboratories will release “All I Can Say” in select U.S. virtual cinemas on June 26, 2020.
D’Angelo in “Devil’s Pie – D’Angelo” (Photo by Carine Bijlsma)
“Devil’s Pie – D’Angelo”
Directed by Carine Bjilsma
Back in the mid-to-late ‘90s, the media singled out a select number of rising R&B artists and labeled them as part of a “neo-soul” movement—artists releasing music that had something more interesting to say than bump’n’grind of acts like Bobby Brown or Jodeci or safe crossover acts like Boyz II Men or Brandy. The so-called “neo-soul” artists included D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Maxwell, Angie Stone and Macy Gray. D’Angelo’s first album, 1995’s “Brown Sugar,” was a critical and commercial success. His follow-up was even bigger and remains his best-selling album. By the time D’Angelo’s Grammy-winning, chart-topping second album, “Voodoo,” was released in 2000, he was on a hot streak. And he became a bona fide sex symbol, thanks largely to his naked “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” video.
But then, fame, alcohol and drugs took their toll on D’Angelo (whose real name is Michael Eugene Archer), and he went on a very long hiatus. It took 14 years before his third album (2014’s “Black Messiah”) was released. D’Angelo went on a world tour in 2015 called “The Second Coming” in support of the album. The documentary “Devil’s Pie – D’Angelo” is a chronicle of that tour.
The concert scenes are very good, but the main reason why people want to see this film is to hear D’Angelo answer this question: “What really happened when you disappeared from the spotlight for all those years?” You have to sit through the expected footage of tour rehearsals and concert performances before “Devil’s Pie” director Carine Bjilsma gets to the heart of the matter about halfway through the movie. Watching the film, it’s apparent that it took a while for D’Angelo to open up to her on camera.
D’Angelo talks about his downward spiral, which included a serious car accident and arrest for DUI and marijuana possession in 2005. He was devastated by the deaths of his beloved grandmother Alberta, his Uncle Cece, and a close friend (not mentioned by name in the film but it’s widely believed to be MTV executive Fred Jordan), who all passed away within a short period of time of each other in the early 2000s. In 2010, D’Angelo was arrested again, this time for soliciting an undercover cop posing as a prostitute. He doesn’t talk about those arrests in the film, but he does admit that his addictions were the main reasons why he faded from the public eye.
“I started going down a dark path,” D’Angelo says in the movie. “I started drinking and getting high. It was tough to get out of it.” He also says that the car accident was a “second chance” at life, and he went to rehab three times before he could get his life back in order. However, D’Angelo says with his eyes tearing up, he can’t talk about certain things because “they’re too deep.”
One of D’Angelo’s personal issues is dealing with anxiety, according to him and people interviewed in the documentary. Questlove, who was a drummer in D’Angelo’s band on the “Voodoo” tour, says of his longtime friend: “It’s a struggle for him to do simple stuff, like leave his apartment and coming somewhere to play. He has fears about being the chosen one.”
Through flashback archival footage, which is shown at different parts of this non-chronological story, we see what this “chosen one” description is all about. Raised in a strict, religious family in Richmond, Virginia, he was the son of a Pentecostal minister, and expectations were high for D’Angelo from a very early age. There is footage of him performing in church.
He was considered a musical prodigy by people close to him (he won The Apollo’s amateur contest three times in a row at the age of 13), and there was a lot of pressure put on him to pursue a religion-related career as a minister or a gospel singer. But D’Angelo chose R&B music, much to the disapproval of many of his family members. One of the key influences on him was his feisty grandmother Alberta Cox, who encouraged him to do his own thing, while other people in his family warned him not to do the “devil’s music.” (This movie’s title come from the D’Angelo’s song “Devil’s Pie” from the “Voodoo” album. “Devil’s pie” is also a phrase that can be found in the Bible’s Revelation 13 chapter describing the apocalypse.)
As for how he feels about religion now, D’Angelo says that “God, not religion” feeds his soul. We see early on in the film that he still prays (there’s the expected prayer session with his band), and he says of this ritual: “When we pray at night, it’s not a game.”
In addition to showing how religion still impacts D’Angelo’s life, this movie has a lot of talk (mostly from Questlove) about D’Angelo’s soul. Questlove says of D’Angelo: “He’s Superman, but a Kryptonite-filled Clark Kent is trapped in his soul.” In another scene, Questlove has this to say about D’Angelo’s sex-symbol status that began to overshadow the music: “Part of his soul was being consumed.” And then Questlove offers this explanation for D’Angelo’s tormented soul: “Survivor’s guilt is what every black genius wrestles with.” If D’Angelo needs someone to write a book about his soul, he might want to ask Questlove to do it.
There’s also some rare archival footage of D’Angelo in the studio recording his “Voodoo” album, with Questlove and Q-Tip hanging out in the background. Questlove says that it took a while for him to get used to D’Angelo’s avant-garde musical style: “He was blatantly, beautifully disrespectful of rhythm structure.”
Feeling emotionally paralyzed by intense pressure is a recurring theme in the story of D’Angelo, as he tells of wasted recording sessions in the years that people were expecting him to release the follow-up to “Voodoo.” There are also scenes of him backstage, usually accompanied by his hovering tour manager Alan Leeds, where it looks like D’Angelo is silently coping with stage fright before the concert starts.
There are a few signs that D’Angelo’s long hiatus means that he’s still catching up to a lot of the technological changes that affect how artists get feedback about their shows. After a concert, instead of waiting for critics’ reviews, his manager Kevin Liles explains to D’Angelo that he can just check out social-media comments about the show. Liles then shows the singer some of the comments on his phone.
The documentary also shows some of the famous guests who visited backstage during the tour, including Busta Rhymes, Dave Chappelle and Bobby Seale. Chappelle is seen asking D’Angelo how it feels to be back, which is somewhat ironic, since Chappelle took his own break from showbiz in the 2000s, after freaking out over being famous, and then made a comeback in the following decade.
Because D’Angelo has a reputation for being unpredictable, there’s a sense that his handlers are always on edge that he might disappear or be very late for a public appearance. Instead, toward the end of the movie, D’Angelo’s keyboardist Cleo “Pookie” Sample is the one who has a major flake-out, by disappearing right before D’Angelo is supposed to hit the stage at the high-profile Montreux Jazz Festival. A frantic search ensues, but they don’t find him before showtime, and D’Angelo and the band have to go on without him. The missing keyboardist isn’t seen for the rest of the movie, which means the split was not a good one.
“Devil’s Pie” ends with a mention that D’Angelo is working on his fourth studio album, but—D’Angelo fans are used to hearing this by now—no one knows yet when it will be completed or released. In the meantime, this movie will likely end up being a direct-to-video release, since a documentary about a faded R&B star’s tour from several years ago isn’t going to sell a lot of movie tickets. “Devil’s Pie” is what it is—a niche documentary made in a conventional (but not bad) way that might not have much appeal outside of die-hard D’Angelo fans.
Less than a month before the documentary “XY Chelsea” was supposed to have its world premiere at 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, controversial whistleblower Chelsea Manning (who’s the subject of the movie) was arrested on March 8, for refusing to testify before a grand jury about the classified U.S. government documents that she leaked to WikiLeaks in 2010. Before the arrest kept her in jail, Manning had been scheduled to attend the “XY Chelsea” premiere and to do an on-stage Q&A afterward. The filmmakers also had to redo the ending of the movie to include updates about the arrests of Manning and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was taken into custody on April 11, 2019.
It’s one of many twists and turns to Manning’s saga that this revealing documentary chronicles with an unwavering purpose: to show viewers who she really is and how she has adjusted to life outside of prison. Manning was imprisoned from 2010 to 2017, the year that President Barack Obama commuted her 35-year sentence. At a post-premiere Q&A, Manning’s criminal-defense attorney Nancy Hollander said that Manning’s refusal to testify is a protest against the system.
Back in 2010, when Manning was first arrested for the notorious case, she was Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old U.S. Army soldier and intelligence analyst with access to thousands of classified government documents. After being convicted of violating the Espionage Act and other crimes in 2013, Manning announced that she was going to live her life as a transgender woman named Chelsea Elizabeth Manning. The “XY” in the documentary’s title refers to the chromosomes that determine if a human is male or female; males typically have the XY chromosome, while females usually have the XX chromosome.
Manning has given many interviews and speeches since her release from prison, and she also had a failed 2018 campaign for U.S. Senator to represent her home state of Maryland. But this documentary, which had unprecedented access to Manning, gives viewers a raw and unflinching look at her life behind the scenes.
The movie begins with the news that Manning was pardoned and is set to be released from prison. As a trans woman who was forced to dress like a man in prison, viewers see that Manning has already picked out the type of clothes she wants to wear after her prison release. There’s a phone conversation with Manning instructing her attorney Hollander on the exact pages of fashion magazines where she can find the clothes that Manning wants to wear. Stepping on the plane that will take her to her new home, it’s clear that Manning still can’t quite believe that she is no longer in prison. But Manning isn’t a typical ex-con, and it’s clear she can’t have a “normal” life because of her notoriety. She has to deal with a multitude of issues, including life after prison, life after the military, and life after coming out as a trans woman.
Viewers see that even though she’s no longer in prison, Manning can’t feel completely free because she believes that the government will always be out to get her, now that she’s been declared an enemy of the state. Her paranoia is palpable as she checks for hidden recording devices when she’s in a hotel room. And because Manning has admitted to suicide attempts while she was in prison, there’s an underlying sense that her mental health has varying degrees of fragility.
In the documentary’s interviews, Manning opens up about her unhappy childhood. She says both of her biological parents were heavy drinkers, her father was abusive, and she was hated so much by her stepmother that she was eventually kick out of their home. Manning also said that although her father had a problem with her living as a gay man, it didn’t bother him as much as when she revealed her true identity as a transgender woman.
As for why she joined the military in the first place, Manning said she did it “almost on a whim” because it was her way of trying to escape her trans identity. By joining an establishment that requires strict conformity, Manning said that she was hoping that the military could “cure” her sexual identity, much like “going cold turkey from a drug addiction.”
She is more guarded about what it was like to be a transgender woman in prison. Choosing her words carefully, and often pausing before she speaks, Manning said that she was constantly watched in prison, guards would do things such as walk in on her while she was changing clothes, and people’s reactions to her trans identity were “complicated” and “human.” Manning’s experience in solitary confinement has left emotional scars, since she said that a part of her died when she had to spend so much time in isolation.
While out of prison, the documentary shows Manning becoming very active on social media. In the photo shoot for her first post-prison portrait (which she uses as a social-media profile picture), she jokes that her low-cut blouse might show too much “boobage.” As Manning’s post-prison life evolves into very outspoken activism, particularly against Republicans, she experiences extreme reactions from the public: The people who love her think she’s an American hero, and they treat her almost like a rock star when she’s at political events. There people who hate her think she’s a traitor, and they treat her like a disgusting freak.
Manning’s mantra/political slogan has become “We Got This,” as a way of saying that whatever life throws her way, she can handle it. Her decision to run for U.S. Senate as a first-time political candidate speaks to how high her ambitions are and the groundswell of support that she felt from people. However, there’s a sense of loneliness that permeates Manning’s life—she’s estranged from her family and does not have very many close friends, since she understandably finds it difficult to trust people, and her fame causes a certain isolation. At one point in the documentary, Manning says, “I know I’m not the person that people think I am.”
The documentary also shows what happened behind the scenes during Manning’s Senate campaign and the moment that it all imploded in January 2018. In a misguided attempt at what Manning calls “rapport building,” she went to a right-wing political event called “A Night for Freedom” in New York City, where she was seen hobnobbing with pro-Trump supporters and people who express racist, sexist and homophobic viewpoints. As Manning described it on social media, she “crashed the fascist/white supremacist hate brigade party,” and that she “learned in prison that the best way to confront your enemies is face-to-face in their space.” But she got an immense amount from backlash from left-wing people, many of whom withdrew their support of her. (Manning lost the Senate primary by a landslide.)
In “XY Chelsea,” Manning is seen having a meltdown over the backlash, which she mistakenly thought would blow over in a few days. In a tension-filled scene, Manning shouts to spokesperson Janus Rose and campaign manager/communications director Kelly Wright, “This is driving us into the fucking ground!” Later, Manning fights back tears, as she says that going to the “Night for Freedom” event was “indefensible” and “wrong.” She adds, “I’m not a hero. I’ve just always been someone wanting to do something.”
And in a prophetic scene near the end of the movie, Manning has this to say about why she’s chosen to be a risk-taking activist speaking out against government corruption: “What are they going to do? Throw me in prison? Kill me? They’re going to do that anyway if we let them. I’d rather go down fighting.”
Showtime will premiere “XY Chelsea” on June 7, 2019.
