Surprised there is no thread on this yet (but not surprised nobody knows about it since it’s Showtime). Anyone watching? Fascinating and well made. Covers his whole career but is focused on the Lana Clarkson murder. I think the last episode of the 4-part series airs this Sunday (11/27)
Funny, how they didn’t mention he worked with George Harrison, his first solo album. Thank God they retried him and got the conviction.
Just watched this doc on Sky here in UK. Excellent series. Whist I knew of Phil's proclivities on account of reading/watchig several Ramones books and documentaries (Johnny's 'Im surprised he didn't shoot someone every day), the details of both Lana's murder and Phil's behaviour with other women prior still shocked. I'm glad the series took the time to humanise Lana (unlike Spector's defence which tried to reduce her to hapless, suicidal bimbo), and found all of the contributors to be engaging and honest. In particular Nicole Spector came across as nuanced, thoughtful and considered when describing her relationship with her father and the events concerned. Even more so than before, the series requires a separation of art (those transcendent songs, those singers the songs showcased, the later Beatles & Ramones collaborations) from that of the artist (a deeply unpleasant human being found guilty of murder).
I've also seen all four episodes. I never liked Spector and I remember Lennon saying in an interview once how Spector fired a gun in the recording studio. I'm glad he was convicted. Very unpleasant individual who finally got what he deserved.
Spector did talk about ATMP & Bangaladesh in the ‘blonde wig’ interview; the footage is in Scorsese’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World doc. Would have thought the Spector doc would have used at least a snippet, given the arguably equal as wide significance of George/ATMP & John/POB and Imagine.
I'm sure they didn't have access to that footage. But it is weird that they didn't at least narrate a bit on that piece of Spector's story.
This etched itself in my memory when I saw it as an itty bitty kid on TV when it first screened. Repellent, yet compelling at the same time. Disturbing but the music soared. A demonstration of how some of the greatest art can come from very dark places in the human soul.
To me, it was a terrible documentary in that all it really did was sensationalize the murder. It was really only about the murder of Lana Clarkson, not a documentary about Phil Spector's life (which is what it purported to be). I don't dispute that Spector was a terrible, abusive human being, flawed to the core in many ways. But I think they took the easy way out by not spending an hour or two on the boat-load of hits he was responsible for in the first 10-15 years of his career. I also think they could have focused on his crazy family: his father, who killed himself by asphyxiation in their garage; his mother Bertha, who was in and out of asylums for years; and his sister, who had a lot of problems as well. The whole family was crazy. I'm not saying this as an excuse -- I'm just saying there was more to Spector than just being a murderer. I had imagined for the last couple of years doing a film on his life story and starting on him while he was dying at 81 of Covid in a prison cell, and showing a flashback to his doo-wop groups and pop groups in high school, his early hits, interning with Leiber & Stoller, starting his record label, creating the Wall of Sound, and all of the other accomplishments he had before going off the rails in the 1990s. It's a tragic story, a classic Hollywood "rise and fall" tale.
As far as I’m concerned there was no proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he murdered her. The gun was into Clarkson’s mouth when it went off, which is different than all of the other cases that were brought up, where he sure would wave guns around and point them at people, but never terrorized people into first sitting down, then opening their mouth so he would stick the gun in, and then threaten to pull the trigger. Since Clarkson was sitting down, Spector’s arm and fist would have had to be bent out of shape for him to fire the gun, and there is the major fact that you would expect gun powder residue and blood on Spector’s clothes, and there was none. The prosecution’s theory was that Spector became enraged when Clarkson told him she wanted to leave. If she was standing up when she told him, or even if she was already sitting down, that means that she watched as Spector retrieved the gun, walked toward her, got her to open her mouth and unclench her teeth and put the barrel of the gun into her mouth. It’s all possible, but in similar situations, people are known to run away, or push the gun away, or pretend they want to stay after all in order to cool down the person’s rage — which are all better options for survival than unclenching your teeth and letting a drunk man with Parkinson’s disease stick a gun into your mouth. Clarkson was depressed, as evidenced by her having put encouraging post-it notes all over her bathroom, which is something therapists suggest depressed people do to cheer themselves up. The prosecution also used the old prosecutor’s fallacy, which in that case was « suicidal people very rarely kill themselves in a stranger’s home ». That’s absolutely true, but it’s also very rare that you go home with a rich celebrity you met at a bar and end up murdered by him 30 minutes later. In this case, both possibilities as to what could have happened were, in statistical terms, very unlikely.
Phil was seen leaving the house holding the gun after it was fired saying, "I think I just shot her", and you maintain it was a suicide?
If you know the facts of the trial, Spector was such a nut that he had security cameras hidden all over the 10,000-square foot "Pyrenees Castle" in Alhambra... but mysteriously, all the security tapes of he lobby and front entrance to his house (where the murder took place) disappeared by the time the cops showed up. If he was innocent, the cameras would have shown the woman killing herself and he would've immediately been exonerated. I think this is an Occam's Razor case: the simplest explanation makes the most sense, and Spector was drunk and/or high, got carried away in threaten her, stuck a gun in her mouth, and blew her away. He had threatened people in the past with guns but never shot anybody, though there was the time he shot out the ceiling of the A&M recording studio where he was working with John Lennon for the Rock & Roll sessions. The hole was still slightly visible the last time I was there, in 1977. I think Spector was an immensely talented man, but also a crazy insecure egotist who had a lot of very deepset psychological problems. On the one hand, I feel sorry for him, but on the other... he's an abusive guy who eventually murdered an innocent woman. That was the testimony by the chauffeur, who had seen a lot of bad stuff while working for Spector.
He had a long history as a creative talent, working with folks at the Brill Building, the Wall of Sound, the Girl Groups, what he "did" to the Beatles, for better or worse, but he was a sort of pathetic individual. As I recall, his father killed himself, and the epitaph was "To know him Was to Love Him" which was one of many songs that Spector produced. He was a madman. But we necessarily accept that genius borders on madness and may be hard to distinguish. His epitaph is "murderer" but it doesn't reveal his importance to popular music of the day.
The chauffeur was cross-examined, and some doubt was raised regarding whether he could have misheard, considering it was 5 in the morning, he hadn't slept or eaten in 24 hours and his grasp of English left a lot to be desired. He also couldn't decide on whether Spector said "shot" or "killed", which is an important point because if he misheard or didn't remember that word, what about the others? Spector was also very drunk and he had a raspy voice, which in the best of circumstances is difficult to understand. The words themselves would have been strange, coming out of Spector's mouth in those circumstances : "I think I killed somebody". First, there could have been no doubt in Spector's mind that he did kill Clarkson, considering how she died. So why the qualifier "I think I killed somebody"? And the chauffeur would have known who the victim was, since he knew there was nobody else in the house and he himself had driven Clarkson to the mansion. So you would expect Spector to say "I killed her" not "somebody". Also, the prosecution held that Spector was clear-headed enough to rearrange the crime scene, and notably put the gun at the feet of the chair where Clarkson died, when he supposedly held the gun in his hand when he talked to the chauffeur. So if he was alert enough to try to hide his crime, why would he confess to it to his driver?
I admit I don't know about this. I tried to Google more information but couldn't find it. Could you give me more info?
His epitaph is "murderer" for the people who barely knew who he was when his name got in the news again because of Clarkson's death, and for people who don't care that much about the history of American pop music. The same way some people can only think "antisemite" when they hear the words Richard Wagner. People who know and love rock music will never forget he was the greatest producer who ever worked in the field. His crime, which he committed more than 20 years after he even stopped making music, doesn't erase all the rest. Joe Meek killed a woman with a shotgun, and yet he's still discussed today -- by the dwindling number of people who care about him -- as a great producer, and I think there is still an official "Joe Meek Award for Innovation" handed out in the UK.
That's what I was worried they would do, which is why I didn't check it out, since "true crime" is not really a topic I find all that interesting. I would be really interested in seeing a whole-life documentary about Spector; he was a terrible person, a brilliant artist, and a huge part of music history. Of course include the murder, but not make it the entire focus. But I think they felt like most people who would be interested in seeing this were only really aware of the murder and not about the historical stuff, so they went with that as the focus.
Yeah, this is a good point. For some reason they don't tend to focus on that with Meek. OK, he wasn't from what I know about him anywhere near as awful a human as Spector, but that doesn't change the fact that he murdered a totally innocent person for no reason.
Except of course his daughter says he was a wonderful father and a great man. But what would she know compared to us? We're guys on the Internet, she's just the man's daughter. It's funny how with some criminals, their crime is excused in some way: "well think of the way he was raised, and all the abuse he had to put up with as a child, and he had untreated mental illness, and he was drunk, and he didn't think the gun was loaded, and he obviously didn't plan on killing anyone, etc." But with other people it's, "he's a monster". It's like David Mamet wrote in his movie: Spector was guilty of "I-just-don't-like-ya" before a single bit of evidence was heard.
