Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

director (for another stylistic homage, the Douglas
Sirk–indebted 2002 film Far from Heaven), who first
gained attention with his 1987 Karen Carpenter
biopic Superstar, told with stop-motion animated
Barbie dolls and never released (thanks to an
injunction by Carpenter’s brother and bandmate
Richard), was well-intentioned and certainly
charming in his self-deprecation when queried about
the film’s meta conceits. “I always wanted to do the
film this way,” he insists. That the film’s mood offers
almost none of the effervescence of the best of glitter
rock might have something to do with its troubled
production. Haynes admitted that the shoot (in
London in the spring of ’97) was fraught with
budgetary woes. He told Outsmart magazine, “[I
thought,] ‘This should be fun. This should be the
funnest thing I’ve ever done, damn it.’ But it was so
demanding and so ambitious. Then we lost our
financing right before we started and had to find
alternate money, and it made the budget go down a
million dollars, and the budget was already so barebones.
That lost million sort of did us in.” The acting,
however, by mostly British and Australian stars, is
uniformly excellent (especially Myers, then just
nineteen, and Toni Collette as Mandy Slade, who
helps her husband achieve the fame he so
desperately desires only to be pushed to the side
and fall into a heartbroken and dissolute state).
Had Bowie himself been involved, as Bob Dylan
was in Haynes’s far superior 2008 film I’m Not
There, the end results might have coalesced a bit