BEFORE: Yes, there is a second documentary about Little Richard, they were released last year within a month of each other, this one popped up on HBO Max and yesterdays film was part of the PBS series "American Masters". Did we need two documentaries? Here's what I think happened, two separate directors or production companies realized he represented an important topic, especially since gay rights have come further along in the last decade - tonight's film got selected for the Sundance Festival and then made it to the big time, HBO Max, in May - and the "King & Queen of Rock 'n' Roll" doc was probably not going to get a general release, so somebody cut a different distribution deal, to sell the film to PBS, to salvage what they could of this situation. Competition is a good thing, but being second to market is not usually a successful strategy - at that point, someone who's invested years in making a film could stand by and watch as their project becomes irrelevant, so really, any path toward distribution would be preferable to none. This happens all the time with animated films, several different studios will make films about Bigfoot characters ("Missing Link", "Smallfoot") or bugs ("A Bug's Life", "Antz") or fish ("Finding Nemo", "A Shark Tale") and then at some point it becomes a race, because whichever film gets released first is likely to do better, and the second will look like a copycat.
But I've watched many docs about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, there could be room for more than one film on the same musician, you just have to hope that each film takes a different angle, two films that are almost exactly the same wouldn't make much sense.
Little Richard carries over from yesterday's very similar (?) doc and so do a number of other people.
THE PLOT: The life and career of Little Richard, the one-of-a-kind rock 'n' roll icon who shaped the world of music.
AFTER: Yeah, so a lot of the same ground got covered here as in "King & Queen of Rock 'n' Roll", so that's really a shame. It's the same story, same subject, same struggle between the two sides of Little Richard, the side that was the preacher and claimed not to be gay, and the boastful man who sang (and claimed to have invented) rock and roll, and talked about voyeurism and orgies and wearing his mother's make-up and dresses as a child. I want to say tonight's doc did a better job of trying to resolve the split personality, the way he could yo-yo from being gay and boisterous to being a god-fearing Christian who said at one point he hadn't had sex in 14 years. He was BOTH of those things, he changed over time, he contained multitudes, and maybe all things are true, or the truth lies in the middle of all of those things.
I will tell you that I did some research, between the films - I looked up Little Richard's first gospel album on YouTube, and listened to the tracks. They are a complete 180-degree turn from "Good Golly Miss Molly" and "Tutti Frutti" and even "Lucille". Well, again, we know with Elvis he liked to record rock songs AND Gospel songs, and he even had a Christmas album. And Little Richard was a great gospel singer, I think, when he wasn't hollering and yodeling and shouting "WHOOO!" all the time - the gospel album was quite boring by comparison, but maybe that's what sold gospel albums, or what people thought gospel albums should be. There was one exception, though, the song "Joy Joy Joy", give it a listen and you might get a feeling what he could have done by merging both of his worlds, both of his personalities. Imagine gospel music sung with the same intensity as "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and damn it, why couldn't the whole album have been done in that uplifting, exciting way? It's a shame.
(I also researched that first Beach Boys live concert album, released in 1964. Sure, there were a lot of girls screaming at that concert, and the album reflects that, it's almost impossible to find the Beach Boys songs under all that screaming. But I'm forced to admit that maybe the Beach Boys could play their instruments, as the songs were apparently performed live, but again, this was EARLY Beach Boys and the songs were still very simple, like "Surfin' USA" and "Fun Fun Fun" and the hardest thing for them at the time was singing harmonies AND playing guitars at the same time, unless the music was a recorded track (which is still possible) then maybe they could play and sing at the same time. HOWEVER, later tours with more complex songs like "Good Vibrations", I'm still betting they hired those extra musicians on stage for a reason.)
Where was I? Oh, yeah, Little Richard. He was gay when it suited him to be gay, and then he had to be "more gay" than anyone else or say, "I was one of the first people to come out..." which would be impossible to prove, of course, and then a few years later he appeared on the Letterman show and said, "I used to be gay" and "God told me it should be Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve..." Yeah, THAT old chestnut, the one that got Donna Summer in trouble, he said that. So he had some experiences where God spoke to him, or he saw angels saving his plane from engine trouble, and also he was under the impression that the world was going to end soon, and so he figured he better make peace with the man upstairs. Also, apparently in Australia in 1957 he saw a blazing fireball go across the sky (this is right after the angels saved his plane) and took it as a hint to stop singing the devil's music and go to theology school. Later someone told him that the fireball was actually the Sputnik satellite, but it was too late, the message from the Lord had already been received.
Both docs interviewed some of the same people, like his girlfriend Lee Angel, and Sir Lady Java, who was a close friend and female impersonator (or trans, or hermaphrodite, it's not that clear). Nile Rodgers tells the same story in both docs, about David Bowie coming to him with a photo of Little Richard and saying that was his vision board for the "Let's Dance" album. Both films talk about Little Richard's time on the chitlin' circuit, both use the footage of him clowning around with David Johansen at the 1988 Grammys, and both films end with montages of some of the gay and proud musicians that came along and came out later on, pointing out that LIttle Richard paved the way for them. And damn if it isn't almost the exact same montage, with Elton John, Madonna, Prince, Lizzo, and Harry Styles. I mean, that doesn't just HAPPEN, or I guess maybe it does, if both docs are trying to make exactly the same point about Richard's influence. So it's really too bad that these two productions couldn't be combined into one killer documentary, it would have saved both of them some money, renting all that archive footage. But we live in a world of Coke vs. Pepsi, McDonald's vs. Burger King, HBO/Warner/Discovery vs. Paramount/Showtime/MTV. (If you think about it, Coca-Cola and Pepsi could save HALF their advertising budgets every year, they'd just have to agree that Coke would advertise in January, Pepsi in February and so on. Nobody's going to STOP drinking Diet Coke just because they haven't seen a new ad in a while.)
Nope, apparently we need two Little Richard documentaries to cover almost all of the same material, just with slightly different approaches "I Am Everything" uses more talking head-style interviews with journalists and music scholars, while "King and Queen of Rock 'n' Roll" focused more on Little Richard's band members and the people who knew him back before he was famous. Last night's film interviewed Keith Richards, tonight's film interviewed Mick Jagger. Ringo Starr was interviewed in one, Tom Jones in the other. And Little Richard was on so many talk shows over the years - Dave, Merv, Mike Douglas, Tom Snyder, Arsenio Hall, Donny and Marie - there are so many clips to choose from, so you'd think that you could craft whatever narrative you want, just by choosing the clips where he said he was gay OR the clips where he said he'd heard from God and wasn't gay any more.
But you have to watch ALL the clips to really understand this man - I think it's more like he was secretly gay when that suited his career, then his career took off and it didn't really matter, then his career cooled off so with nothing else to do, he went to seminary school and tried very hard to NOT be gay, which we all know now isn't really a workable solution, only people maybe didn't know that back then (late 1950's). Then when he had a second chance at a career in rock, he took it (the 1964 UK tour) and that just brought all the other stuff back with it, and when he was up against the new hippies and the free love movement and the blurring of the genders in the late 1960's, well, he just fit right in and outdid them all - then when gay was finally OK, he was free to say it and be it and also say he invented it, because that's who he was. He was BOTH of those people, ALL of those people - remember, this is the guy who brought his Bible to the orgies, for some reason.
Sure, he was everything, but at different times. He just couldn't find a way to be everything everywhere all at once. So those two sides of him never spoke to each other, he flip-flopped between them, except, maybe, for just a couple brief moments in time - one would be his appearance in the 1986 comedy "Down and Out in Beverly Hills", where he played an evangelist preacher, Orvis Goodnight, and sang a song, "Great Gosh A'Mighty", which he co-wrote with Billy Preston. Finally, he was a preacher and a rock singer AT THE SAME TIME. Secondly, the 1983 Jerry Lewis MDA telethon, where he sang a powerful song called "Someone Worse Off Than I Am", which brought together the powerful singing he was capable of with the very powerful messages that he tried to convey as a preacher. OK, maybe it's not much but it's a little inkling of what more he could have accomplished if he could only have resolved the conflict within himself.
Also, this doc shows Little Richard selling Bibles, and I said yesterday that his bragging reminded me of Donald Trump, now here's another thing they had in common. So yeah, I had to watch both Little Richard docs, but you can just pick one, it doesn't really matter which, you'll get essentially the same story.
Also starring Lee Angel, Mick Jagger, Sir Lady Java, Nile Rodgers (all carrying over from "Little Richard: King and Queen of Rock 'n' Roll"), Libby Anthony, John Branca, Newt Collier, Charles Connor, Ashon Crawley, Charles Glenn, Fredara Hadley, Ralph Harper, Nona Hendryx, Cory Henry, Ramon Hervey, Muriel Jackson, Tom Jones (last seen in "Mel Brooks Unwrapped"), Valerie June, John P. Kee, Jason King, Tony Newman, Tavia Nyong'o, Billy Porter (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Morris Roberts, Zandria Robinson, Stanley Stewart, Billy Vera, John Waters (last seen in "The Velvet Underground"), DeWitt Williams, Keith Winslow,
with archive footage of Chuck Berry, Robert Blackwell, Bill Boggs, Pat Boone, David Bowie, Celine Dion, Alan Freed, Merv Griffin, Arsenio Hall, George Harrison, Michael Jackson, Rick James, David Johansen, Elton John, Brian Jones, John Lennon, David Letterman, Lizzo, Paul McCartney, Elvis Presley, Prince, Keith Richards, Arthur Rupe, Ringo Starr, Harry Styles, Bill Wyman (all 26 carrying over from "Little Richard: King and Queen of Rock 'n' Roll"), La Vern Baker, Boy George (last seen in "Under the Volcano"), David Brenner, James Brown (last seen in "Belushi"), Ruth Brown, RuPaul Charles (last seen in "Fled"), Cher (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Dick Clark (last seen in "The Beach Boys"), Janis Joplin (ditto), Bo Diddley (last seen in "The Stones and Brian Jones"), Jimi Hendrix (ditto), Fats Domino (last seen in "Standing in the Shadows of Motown"), Mike Douglas (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Esquerita, Tom Ewell, Louis Jordan (last seen in "Bitchin' The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Lionel Richie (ditto), Dorothy La Bostrie, Lady Gaga (last seen in "House of Gucci"), Annie Lennox (last seen in "Count Me In"), Jerry Lee Lewis (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Liberace (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Rod Stewart (ditto), Madonna (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Bruno Mars (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Cosima Matassa, Brother Joe May, Freddie Mercury (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Donny Osmond (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Marie Osmond, Earl Palmer, Charles Penniman, Ernestine Penniman, Billy Preston (also last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Lloyd Price, Ma Rainey, Paul Reubens (last seen in "Quiz Lady"), Joan RIvers (last seen in "Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only"), Tom Snyder (last seen in "Love to Love You, Donna Summer"), Bruce Springsteen (last seen in "De Palma"), Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Ike Turner (last seen in "Tina"), Tina Turner (last seen in "McEnroe"), Red Tyler, Clara Ward, Marion Williams, Billy Wright,
and the bands Bon Jovi, Bad Brains, Fishbone, Led Zeppelin (last seen in "Count Me In"), Living Colour, Red Hot Chili Peppers
RATING: 6 out of 10 appearances as "Princess LaVonne"
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