‘Spector’ on Showtime Review

Phil Spector was one of the greatest musicians of the modern era, someone who crafted timeless teenage symphonies and created the archetype of the producer as artist. He was also an abusive misogynist whose reputation as an eccentric was a smokescreen for his habitual misbehavior. The dueling strains of his life collided cataclysmically in the 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson. The new 4-part Showtime documentary series Spector tries to make sense of his complicated legacy and also serves as a tribute to his victim.

We start with the fateful night in February 2003 when Spector’s driver, Adriano de Souza, called 911 from Spector’s palatial mansion in Alhambra, California. “I think my boss just killed somebody,” he tells the operator. Police recordings of their initial encounter with Spector find him defiant, claiming he’s done nothing wrong and that the dead woman in his front hallway had commited suicide. Grim crime scene photos show Clarkson splayed out on a chair. You’d think she was asleep if not for the blood on her torso and the pistol on the floor beneath her legs.

From there we travel back in time to Spector’s youth. His idyllic childhood was torn apart by the suicide of his father when he was 9. Mental health issues would haunt his family, manifesting in both Phil and his sister Shirley. The family relocated to Los Angeles, where Spector’s charm and talent won many admirers but still he says, “I felt hated.” In 1958, he penned and performed on his first hit record, The Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him Is To Love Him.” The title came from the epitaph on his father’s tombstone.

“I was motivated by a sense of destiny,” Spector says in an interview with journalist Mick Brown, recorded weeks before Clarkson’s murder. The hits came fast as he moved into the producer’s chair, picking songs for singers and guiding recording sessions with a singular musical vision. Not yet 21, he sued his mother for access to his earnings and won and founded his own record label. He signed girl groups and then replaced the singers at will, provoking the ire of managers who sent goons to rough him up. His sense of persecution would grow with his success and he surrounded himself with bodyguards and began carrying a gun.

In The Ronettes, Spector found perhaps his greatest musical vehicle and the second of four wives in singer Ronnie Spector née Bennet. They would move into a 23-room Beverly Hills mansion from which she would later flee barefoot in 1972, believing her life was at risk. Though Spector ensconced himself into the Beatles orbit, producing various solo records, tales of his drunken gun waving antics became rock legend and his star started to want. “He seemed like a man walking his last mile,” said Dee Dee Ramone of the contentious recording sessions for the Ramones’ 1980 album End of the Century, one of the last he produced.

As Spector disappeared into his castle, Lana Clarkson was building a career as a model and actress. Born in 1962, she had, like Spector, lost her father at a young age and had a tireless work ethic, enduring demeaning type casting, professional disappointments and personal injury. Tall, blonde and beautiful, she moved from bit parts to starring roles in grind-house films by some of the genre’s most respected names. In interviews with her devoted family and friends, what emerges is a fully fleshed out picture of a respected entertainment industry professional which  upends her portrayal in the media as a failed “B-movie actress” and Hollywood hanger-on, something Spector’s defense team would later try to exploit to their advantage.

While Spector’s first two episodes mostly concentrate on Spector’s life and career, the final two cover his murder trial and its aftermath. Reeling from the acquittals of O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake, local law enforcement was wary of losing another celebrity murder case, where public emotion and media frenzy had an outsize influence. Forensic evidence told conflicting tales, however, the prosecution brought forth a parade of women who shared similar stories of Spector’s physical and sexual abuse and tales of being held captive at his home at gunpoint. His A-list legal team helped facilitate a mistrial in 2007 but Spector was convicted of second-degree murder when retried in 2008 and sentenced to 19 years to life in prison. He died from COVID-19 in January 2021 at the age of 81.

Across Spector’s four episodes, director Sheena M. Joyce seamlessly blends interviews and footage from a variety of sources to create a riveting viewing experience that blurs the line between music documentary, biography and true crime investigation. Her sensitive treatment of the subject matter extends not just to Clarkson but to Spector himself, whose defenders seem genuine in their testimonies to his better side. The series ultimately ponders whether we can still enjoy Spector’s music knowing about his terrible behavior, though, the man himself remains his harshest critic. “I have devils inside that fight me and I am my own worst enemy,” he said weeks before the murder. “For all intents and purposes, I’d say I’m probably relatively insane.”

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter: @BHSmithNYC.