This summer, thanks mostly to the rise of Glen Powell, I’ve been in a lot of discussions about the state of movie stardom. The jury’s still out on whether we have “real” movie stars today, but it’s clear that the process of becoming a celebrity is different now from what it used to be. Social media and the popularity of small-screen entertainment have changed the game.
That question of stardom permeates “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” (premiering Saturday on HBO and Max), an intriguing documentary about one of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, mostly in her own words. In the 1960s, Taylor gave interviews to the prolific journalist Richard Meryman, who died in 2015. Meryman, who had been known for his interviews with celebrities, was researching a book. Recently, more than 40 hours of tapes containing Taylor’s interviews were found in his archive.
That audio, in which Taylor is reflective and candid, is the backbone for this documentary. The director Nanette Burstein takes a smart approach to the material, layering the conversation — along with audio from a handful of older interviews with Taylor and some of her friends — on top of archival footage from her life.
Taylor became a familiar screen presence while still very young, with her first screen role, in “There’s One Born Every Minute,” hitting theaters when she was 10, in 1942. Soon after, she starred in “Lassie Come Home” and “National Velvet” and turned into a figure of fascination for the audiences. Thus the cameras followed her everywhere.
For the Taylor enthusiast, the film is unlikely to reveal much new information. But that’s not really the point. The movie covers each of her eight marriages and many of her projects, but Taylor’s narration focuses largely on her feelings at the time. Because we’re often seeing footage of her public appearances as she talks about her interior life, the result is almost like a behind-the-scenes track, a fresh disclosure of the disjunction between what we think we know about stars — who they are, how they feel — and what’s actually going on inside.
“Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” also documents, with a harrowing frankness, the precise moment when the public’s interest in celebrities tipped over from worshiping their glittering lives to feeding on their scandals. As the film frames it, Taylor’s split from her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher, after she fell in love with her “Cleopatra” co-star Richard Burton, prompted the birth of the paparazzi: photographers who would chase stars tirelessly to get a juicy shot they could sell. One commentator in the film says they weren’t coming for glamour anymore — they were coming for the destruction of glamour.
Taylor, in her own retelling, says that she decided at some point that it was fruitless to try to “fix” her public image. “People have a set image they want to believe, either the good or the bad,” she says. “If you try to explain, then you lose yourself along the way.” Of course, a series of high-profile fallouts with Burton, substance-abuse issues and her aging appearance were all reliable tabloid fodder. And it pained her, until she found a third act as an AIDS activist.
But “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” suggests that in her own way, Taylor, who died in 2011, paved the path for future generations of stars who would have to deal with celebrity. So it’s not just a fascinating glimpse into a woman who spent her whole life in the spotlight. It’s a chronicle of a moment when everything changed, and a sobering reminder that we often think we know who public figures are, but we rarely really understand.
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