Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes is a 2024 American
documentary film, directed by Nanette Burstein. It explores the life and career
of Elizabeth Taylor, told through access to Taylor's archives and newly found
audio.
It had its world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival
on May 16, 2024, and was released on August 3, 2024, by HBO.
Explores the life and career of Elizabeth Taylor, told
through access to her archives and newly found audio.
The film had its world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film
Festival on May 16, 2024.]
It also screened at the Tribeca Festival on June 11, 2024. and the Nantucket
Film Festival in June 2024. It was released on August 3, 2024, on HBO.
The film received an 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Documentary
Lens
‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes’ and
the Moment Star Worship Curdled
The
documentary blends audio interviews with footage from her life to provide a
revealing look not so much at the actress, but at celebrity culture.
Alissa
Wilkinson
By Alissa
Wilkinson
Published
Aug. 2, 2024
Updated Aug.
5, 2024
Elizabeth
Taylor: The Lost TapesDirected by Nanette Burstein Documentary
Not Rated1h
40m
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/movies/elizabeth-taylor-the-lost-tapes-celebrity-culture.html
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, some 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.
A correction
was made on Aug. 5, 2024: An earlier version of this article misstated how many
hours of recorded interviews were available. It is 40 hours, not more than 40.
Review
Elizabeth
Taylor: The Lost Tapes review – they don’t make stars like this any more
This
absolute treat of a documentary uses a treasure trove of newly discovered audio
interviews to paint an intimate, captivating picture of the actor
Lucy Mangan
Sat 10 Aug 2024 18.00 EDT
Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes could have been called
Elizabeth Taylor: A Lost Era. The tapes were found recently in the archive of
the late journalist Richard Meryman. They include 40 hours of audio interviews
Meryman did with Taylor as part of his research for a book. They start in 1964
when she was 32 and at the peak of her fame. Her voice is breathy and seductive
until she needs to make a point, but it is always expressive and captivating –
even without the accompaniment of her extraordinarily beautiful face.
Nanette Burstein’s film layers the Taylor-Meryman audio with
archive film and television footage: we see 1940s and 50s Beverly Hills and
Hollywood, Taylor at publicity events, her films, family snapshots, and
newspaper and magazine clippings showing the post-juvenile lead with various
beaux. Then there’s on-set footage recorded by close friends such as Roddy
McDowall, showing them frolicking on the beaches with the likes of Montgomery
Clift, or horsing around with James Dean on film sets. There is an inescapable
innocence to it all, even now we know that the boyfriends were chosen and the
dates arranged by her studio, MGM, and that most of her close friends were gay
men, closeted by the social mores of the time. While Taylor provided a
heterosexual gloss for these actors, they in their turn shielded the star from
predatory straight men. The bloom may be off the 50s’ rose, but the idea of a
world away from a thousand camera phones and instant social media cancellations
remains curiously endearing – as does the appeal of an audience unified by
their adoration of a handful of impeccably glamorous stars.
It was Taylor’s relationship with Richard Burton that helped
usher in the new era. After her third husband, the producer Mike Todd, was
killed in a plane crash in 1958, she created a scandal by “stealing” his best
friend, Eddie Fisher, from his publicly beloved wife, Debbie Reynolds. She
added insult to injury by divorcing Fisher after she fell in love with Burton
when they met on the set of Cleopatra. Their relationship was denounced by the
Vatican, they made headline news all over the world, and photographers began to
follow them, disguising themselves to get close to the couple. The age of the
paparazzo was born. The change is succinctly summarised in an interview with
the actor George Hamilton: “They were not going for glamour any more. They were
going for the destruction of glamour.”
It all creates an unprecedentedly intimate portrait of
Taylor. Or the “trying-to-be-an-actress”, as she often refers to herself. The
question of whether she would ever fully accomplish the transition from mere
movie star is one that she was still pondering at the time of the Meryman
interviews. Clips of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which she and Burton
starred as the bitterly and heartbreakingly co-dependent married couple George
and Martha, are proof enough that she surely would have – if the studios and
the public had given her the chance to leave the path they’d chosen for her.
The film does not sidestep the trap set by such intimate
access and remains inescapably hagiographic. Meryman lets Taylor speak with
barely any pushback (and when it does come, it is mainly when she claims not to
feel like a sex symbol, and gives instead a practical, no-nonsense account of
what it means for any attractive woman to move through the world). The film
itself gives no hint of Taylor’s excesses and conspicuous consumption, which
began when she was with Todd and were certainly part of her story by the time
of Burton. Nor does it examine the stories of her temper, her selfishness or
any of the diva-like behaviours that, while doubtless exaggerated by the media
at the time, were not untrue.
The remaining decades of her life after the tapes end are
compressed into the last seven or so minutes of the film. So we hear only
briefly about her time being treated for drink and prescription-drug addiction
at the Betty Ford clinic (no hint of it was made regarding the years covered by
the tapes, when it was already under way), and there is nothing about either
her marriage to Larry Fortensky (whom she met there), or her devoted friendship
with Michael Jackson, all of which were emblematic of the far less composed or
wise side than we get from the Meryman interviews. Her fearless and
compassionate Aids activism, in the days when the disease still carried a
terrible stigma, is given its due.
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