THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF PHIL SPECTOR directed by Vikram Jayanti. A TIFF presentation. 102 minutes. Opens today (Thursday, January 27) at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. For movie times, theatres, and trailers see Movies. Rating: NNN
When Vikram Jayanti got word that the BBC was looking to commission a documentary about Phil Spector’s murder trial, he knew he had to be the one to make it.
“I sort of specialize in films about geniuses in trouble,” Jayanti explains from his Los Angeles home. “Some people call it my American Monsters series.”
A few months before the trial began in 2007, Jayanti sent Spector a letter requesting an interview. Spector, who’d seen some of Jayanti’s documentaries, invited him over. The result is The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Phil Spector, a sort of subjective deposition in which Jayanti lets the legendary Wall of Sound producer tell his life story as he perceives it.
“I realized that I wanted just to let Phil be Phil,” Jayanti says. “I figured all the negatives would be taken care of by the prosecution in the trial, which I knew I was gonna use. I just thought, ‘How would someone like him want to be heard? What would he say?’ I didn’t challenge him on some of the sort of slightly out-there stuff he said, because I wasn’t looking to prove him wrong or anything. I wanted to find out what was inside him.”
What’s inside Spector turns out to be a megalomaniac with a massive persecution complex. The documentary alternates his self-serving stories about his career with footage from the trial, backed by his indelible pop songs.
“I would watch Phil [during the trial],” Jayanti says, “and I kept thinking, ‘He’s not really here. He’s listening to his greatest hits in his head, thinking, ‘Don’t they know who I am?’ I wanted to get that into the film, the sense that these songs are running through his head while the trial is progressing.”
Spector’s head seems like a fairly noisy place. His anecdotes are self-aggrandizing and full of attacks on people he’s convinced have wronged him (Tony Bennett is a frequent, inexplicable target), painting a picture of a man who can never be happy with his own success.
“What’s interesting to me is that he’s not comfortable with feeling he’s earned it,” Jayanti says. “He has to feel that everyone disrespects him. He’s a guy who will endlessly feel hard done by, and unfortunately that has fuelled the sort of behaviour that makes it self-fulfilling.”
That behaviour – indulged by sycophants and hangers-on over the decades – also leads directly to Lana Clarkson, the woman found dead of a gunshot wound in Spector’s hallway on the morning of February 3, 2003.
“We think of artists and we think of geniuses as rather specialized types of human beings,” Jayanti says. “We make allowances for them that we don’t make for, say, the mailman. I think Phil was sitting in court thinking, ‘Wait, I wrote You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling. So what are these people talking about?'”
The first prosecution ended in a mistrial the documentary ends with a text screen explaining that Spector was convicted of second-degree murder in a 2009 retrial and sentenced to 19 years to life. I have to ask Jayanti what he thinks of the result. Does he think Spector killed Clarkson, or was it a terrible accident, as Spector claims?
“My personal, visceral response,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “is that I couldn’t stop seeing the terribly damaged little boy who was driven to try to make things right for himself by making sublime music that gave the soundtrack to a generation. But I think that night is the great Hollywood Babylon story. For all my compassion for him, what happened that night wouldn’t have happened anywhere else but in his house.”
normw@nowtoronto.com
Interview Clips
Vikram Jayanti on securing an interview with Phil Spector:
Jayanti on Spector’s tendency to invent his own truth:
Jayanti on the psychology of Spector:
Jayanti on the shadow of John Lennon:
Jayanti on the one request that set Spector off:
