On What Side Is The Phil Spector HBO Movie Exactly?
There’s a new David Mamet film about Phil Spector, which you will be able to see on HBO very soon. However, a group of protesters, holding signs like ‘HBO's Phil Spector murders the truth. No Emmy for the film that hurts people alive today’, gathered around the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Thursday to show their disapproval of the movie which tends to imply that Lana Clarkson committed suicide and wasn’t killed by Spector.
Clarkson was found dead in Spector’s house 10 years ago, and Spector was sentenced to 19 years to life in jail
One of the protestors, Clarkson's former publicist, Edward Lozzi, declared to the Hollywood Reporter: ‘To see that this film was going to be made was a slap in the face. We were so happy Phil Spector was in prison’. Yes, what about that? They proved he was guilty and this movie wants to revise justice?
According to Lozzi, the movie, which stars Al Pacino as Spector and Helen Mirren as defense attorney Linda Kenney Baden, focuses on Spector’s defense, suggesting that Clarkson committed suicide because she was depressed after turning 40. Mamet think we will never know if Spector did it or not, and has even suggested that he might be innocent.
I am no expert in law, but observing how difficult it is to convict a celebrity (O.J. Simpson? Michael Jackson?) I was impressed that Spector got in jail! And I had always had the conviction that they must have had definitive evidence against Spector!
To save the situation, HBO released a statement, calling the movie 'an exploration of the client-attorney relationship’ and adding that ‘Mamet approaches the story of Phil Spector as a mythological one, not as a news story, and the film is not an attempt to comment upon the trial or its outcome, HBO’s goal is to provide a creative platform for three great artists – David Mamet, Al Pacino and Helen Mirren – to explore this complex chapter in recent cultural history. While there may be many disparate interpretations of the film’s intentions, we feel the film speaks for itself.’
Yeah, right! If it is fiction, why saying it is about the famous producer?
And the irony in all this is that Phil Spector's wife is pissed off at the movie for the opposite reason! This is what she just declared to Entertainment Tonight:
'They [the producers] have him as a foul-mouthed megalomaniac and they depict him as a Minotaur. Like he draws people into his labyrinth and he locks them in and won't let them out.'
'During the trials, they characterized him as a monster. This guy [Phil] couldn't hurt a fly. He had no gunshot residue on him at all. He was wearing white, and if you're in the vicinity of an intraoral gunshot wound… it's like 5,000 pounds per square inch of pressure — you would have blood, tissue and particles [all over you]. Her [Clarkson's] two front teeth were actually ejected to the top of the stairs. There was nothing on him."
She even added that she was 'absolutely not' ever scared for her life when she was with him.
Err couldn't hurt a fly? I am not impressed by her defense, and this sudden belief in his innocence is plain weird, everything I have read about Spector led me to think he was a crazy gun nuts with a history of violence against women and people in general. I am just surprised that Spector killed only one person during his lifetime.
