BEFORE: Damn it, I missed Whitney Houston's birthday by ONE DAY - she was born on August 9, 1963 so yesterday would have been her 55th birthday, if she hadn't made the terrible career move of dying in 2012. And if I hadn't dropped in that film with Carl Reiner and Tony Bennett about people being active in their 90's, I would have hit it right on, too! You know what, I'm counting it, because I started watching this film late on August 9, before midnight. And yeah, I know there's another Whitney Houston documentary that got released very recently, early July I think, but I'm not going to the movie theater just to see that, not when I have access to this film at home.
Whitney Houston carries over from "George Michael: Freedom", and so does at least one record company executive.
AFTER: This one's from the same director as the documentary "Kurt & Courtney", Nick Broomfield. It seems he's learned a lot in the 20 years since that other documentary, namely how to NOT make the film all about himself, and I approve of that. He's nearly invisible here, and that may have more to do with the fact that this is mostly made up of archive footage of Whitney and her family and her entourage. But in the interviews with her band members, friends and bodyguard you can't hear the questions being asked, and I think overall that's a better way to go. And nobody's barging in to stores or businesses with a camera crew and being annoying.
If I consider that my rockumentary is now in Phase 2, and I realize this is all very arbitrary, but let's just say that Phase 1 was all about the early days of rock music, the 1950's through the early 1970's, and focused on the biggest names of the time, and what substances they liked to ingest. Phase 2 seems to be taking a slightly different track, though of course there were still drug users (Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and now Whitney) in the 1980's and 1990's, something being brought up now is a search for identity - who are these people as artists, and how does their professional image differ from what's going on behind the scenes? Who were Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and George Michael as people, and how did that differ from their images, their on-stage personas.
Let's face it, with Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, there wasn't a lot of mystery, what you saw on stage was pretty much representative of who they were in private. But now we're in a whole topic with George Michael and Whitney Houston, and if I compare and contrast there's another one of those heads/tails things, like with Chuck Berry and Elvis. George Michael was a white guy who had some success on the R&B charts, and was accused of appropriating black music, while Whitney was a black woman who had big success on the pop charts, and some people complained that her music sounded too white. (Don't you know, someone's always going to complain about something...)
George Michael came out as gay (even if it was basically a fait accompli by the time he did) but during the 1980's, he reportedly slept with women, too, and obviously had a ton of female fans. Now with Whitney there were plenty of rumors about her and friend/manager Robyn Crawford, whether Whitney was a confirmed bisexual or not is now a question for the ages, but it's certainly possible. Here we see Oprah asking the tough questions to Cissy Houston, about whether she would have approved if Whitney was gay, despite being married to Bobby Brown, and that's not something that Whitney's mother would have approved of, that's one big reason for this to be a secret. (But even still, lack of evidence is not evidence.)
The interviews with Whitney's former bodyguard (and semi-inspiration for the film "The Bodyguard") are quite telling, though for legal reasons they had to block out many of the names in his reports filed with Houston's management company, so whatever he knows about Whitney's relationships remains unknown. Me, I'd be more concerned about a report on her drug use where the words "marijuana" and "vocal cords" are misspelled as "marihuana" and "vocal chords" - how is anybody supposed to take that seriously? Now, Whitney's management - she employed mostly family members, which as we've seen, is a terrible idea - discounted these reports too, but probably not because of the bad spelling. No, we now know that once a singer becomes famous, there are several companies or organizations that benefit from them being constantly out on the road touring or in the studio, pumping out more albums, or doing promotion work. It's a rigorous schedule that can be deadly if the star is not in the best of health, so it's a case where people will kill the golden goose in order to get more eggs.
And like in "Amy" we get to see Whitney here at her worst, when she's not giving the best performance, her make-up is running, or she's just on the verge of collapse. By the turn of the millennium, there were reports of drugs being found in her luggage at airports, and Whitney was turning up late for interviews and rehearsals. Footage here shows her rallying her dancers and musicians before a show, and calling upon Jesus to step in and give them all the strength they need - because that's so much easier than showing up for the show sober. Her musical director also reports that they had to keep lowering the keys of the songs during rehearsal, so that she'd be more likely to hit the high notes during the show. Then came a rehearsal for the Academy Awards where she was fired by Burt Bacharach, because she couldn't remember what song she was supposed to sing ("Over the Rainbow"), and sang a different one instead. Then on a TV special to celebrate 30 years of Michael Jackson's music, she looked extremely thin, and the rumors of drug use began again. Finally in 2002 she admitted to drug use in a TV interview, confirming what everyone pretty much knew at that point. (Repeated in 2009 in another interview with Oprah in 2009...)
I'm not going to get a break from this topic, it seems, because I've got two more docs about deceased music stars coming up next, which will take me to the halfway point of my chain, but then I think I've got a few on the list that are about people who are still living, like Clive Davis and Bruce Springsteen. Geez, I hope I didn't just put a bad hex on them. Then in a little over a week I'll be covering films about Michael Jackson and James Brown, and that mark be the end of Phase 2. Phase 3 could be a completely different animal, with films about the Beach Boys, the Who, Frank Zappa and David Bowie (or heck, maybe just more of the same...) but then I'll wrap things up with a look at heavy metal (Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Rush and more!).
Once again today, I've supplemented the IMDB listings for a music documentary - this one was lacking in terms of both interviewed subjects AND archive footage appearances, so there was a lot for me to do.
What makes keeping track of appearances more difficult is that for the purposes of an IMDB search, an appearance in a film via archive footage doesn't count as a real appearance, so the advanced search engine doesn't show them. But I need to keep track for my purposes, so I have to that myself in a separate list, and then add them at the end of the year to acting roles - for, say, Kevin Costner. Footage from the movie "The Bodyguard" appears in this documentary, so I say that he's also therefore IN this film, but the IMDB apparently disagrees. Or at least it treats that appearance in a different way. Meanwhile, if someone performs on a film's soundtrack, or has a song appear in a film, the IMDB counts that as an "appearance", even though that performs is not SEEN on film, and I don't count that. So if I search my IMDB list for "appearances" by Whitney Houston I'm going to find every time someone used one of her songs in a film, and then I have to discount those results. (I'll keep track of a performer's voice if it's used as the voice of a cartoon character, but not just a vocal appearance in a song, I've got to draw the line somewhere.)
Also starring Kevin Ammons, Tony Anderson, Burt Bacharach, Michael Baker, Tina Brown, Doug Daniel, David Foster (last seen in "Now More Than Ever: The History of Chicago"), Sharlotte Gibson, Toni Gregory, Frances Grill, Cissy Houston (last seen in "Elvis Presley: the Searcher"), Gary Houston, Michael Houston, Pattie Howard, Mary Jones, Ellin Lavar, Wayne Lindsey, Kenneth Reynolds, David Roberts, Allison Samuels, Laurie Starks, Kirk Whalum, and archive footage of Bobby Brown, Bobbi Kristina Brown, Belinda Carlisle, Peter Cetera (also last seen in "Now More than Ever: The History of Chicago"), Kevin Costner (last seen in "Hidden Figures"), Katie Couric (last seen in "Sully"), Robyn Crawford, Clive Davis (also carrying over from "George Michael: Freedom"), Merv Griffin (also last seen in "Now More than Ever: The History of Chicago"), John Russell Houston Jr., Johnny Carson (last seen in "Lovelace"), Serge Gainsbourg, Don King, Julian Lennon (last seen in "Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll"), Lou Rawls, Joan Rivers, Diane Sawyer (last seen in "27: Gone Too Soon"), Mike Tyson, Barbara Walters, Dionne Warwick, Barry White, Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds").
RATING: 5 out of 10 Soul Train awards
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